Plumber jokes abound, usually centering around their exorbitant fees or making fun of do-it-yourself homeowners whose ineptness worsens the situation and requires calling a plumber to save the day. But, though the plumber is in fact highly skilled and generally worth his fee, the homeowner doesn't have to bemoan his inaccessibility to arcane plumber secrets. He doesn't have to remain clueless nor does he have to fear ineptness. He can do quite successfully a number of plumbing-related tasks himself.

The plumber is frankly more interested in focusing on major problems for which he has been extensively trained to solve and is usually content to leave minor issues to the homeowner. So in the rest of this blog, let's get a better understanding of how all the plumbing in your house functions and see what jobs are safe for you to tackle and what are better left to the plumber.

I saw an electric water heater made by A O Smith the other day, the serial number of which defied standard decoding rules for determining manufacturing date. The customer knew that his electric water heater was old, but he didn't know how old and he had no records. One clue was that there was no sacrificial anode. Further investigation turned up an older coding system used by Smith, and according to this code the electric water heater was built in 1979.

Water heater life expectancy, electric or otherwise, is typically cited by the home inspector as twelve to fifteen years on the average, although in some parts of the country there is failure after eight years and in other parts twenty-five years is not unusual. But this particular electric water heater was thirty-two years old and still working fine. Because it was servicing a church rather than a home, its capacity was fifty gallons, albeit used maybe once or at most twice a week, and that use negligible. The TPR valve appeared to be in good condition and functional. The only attention given the electric water heater in the past decade was to drain it once.