Hillbilly Water Heater: That was harder than expected, but…

Last year I had nothing but trouble from my homemade water heater. 200 feet of black hose was so filled with calcium scale that it took forever to get water running freely – in fact I had trouble off and on for most of the summer.

So in November I thought I’d do something smart: I hauled it all down, separated the hose segments and laid them out on a slope so water wouldn’t stand in them, freezing and thawing to break the scale loose from the rubber. Gosh but I’m smart.

And it probably did some good, but this morning when I hauled the first hose off the hillside and connected it to pressure, no water came out the far end. Then the barest trickle came out. Ten minutes later: Barely a trickle. But clearly visible was a big plug of calcium scale, so I got an awl from the powershed and started stabbing the plug – and that worked! After a few minutes of that, I got clear running water! Yay!

The second hose was exactly the same, and so was the third. The fourth, for a wonder, ran clear right away.

So that was time-consuming and really not in the schedule but there’s no doubt it saved me a lot of hassle down the line. Once all four hoses were clear I hooked them one at a time into the heat exchanger box, first replacing their gaskets and wrenching them down nice and tight. And then when I went to test it…

Bingo. Works like new.

Now I expect the weather to go cloudy and cold again, just to be a jerk.