We were out of town for a few days when my parents, who were puppy sitting, let us know that our water heater stopped producing hot water. "Great.." is what went through my mind. When we got back, I did some checks on the water heater. The smart controls were blank. My non-contact voltage tested (which is all I could find that second) indicated that power was getting to it at the wires entering the water heater. I even verified that power was getting to the elements - but no hot water output. So I assumed that lighting or a surge fried the electronics.
I would try to fix myself but no replacement parts at the local store. I didn't want to call a plumber - the cost at that point would be close to replacement cost of the water heater. So I did the next best thing. I bought a new non-smart water heater. I turned off the breaker and installed over a couple hours. Hours later, as I went to test and enjoy the fresh hot water - I was disappointed. There still wasn't any hot water. What?
I searched around and finally found my multi-meter and checked the electrical. I was only getting a few volts instead of the 240v I expected. So it did have power but just barely. So I checked the breaker and it had 240v as expected. I also had a disconnect switch for the water heater that I had installed next to it. I went to pull the disconnect out and wasn't able to. At that point, I figured that was a bad sign and related to the issue. I ended up breaking most of the surrounding plastic face for the disconnect. I finally was able to get to the internals and found that they were melted and the metal switch pieces were not touching correctly.
Once I finally extracted the rest of the parts, I could tell that one of the screw terminals must have loosened and then heated excessively - melting the supports and causing the remaining metal to lose further contact.
A trip to Lowe's got me a new disconnect box. After installation and a "good tightening", we finally had hot water.
Here is a picture of the melted disconnect switch parts.
This was an inconvenient problem but we were blessed by the fact we didn't have a house fire which this could easily could have produced.
Hope your day is blessed. Thanks for reading!
Scott
