Had company at the new house this weekend (and the week before). Big Saturday dinner: pecan-crusted catfish, shittake risotto, a million bottles of wine, etc.. Ended up being a long night.
9:30AM something electronic comes beeping across my sleep: the hot water heater control in our bathroom is beeping and its display is flashing an "11". WTF? I find the manual and look up the code : "No ignition. Check your gas supply." Instead I check the thermostat: it's set to 70, but the inside temp is 65. Right. The hot water heater started complaining when one of our guests tried taking a shower and there wasn't any propane to burn to heat their water.
Turns out, being all new to this country life thing, we neglected to learn anything about our heating gas supply. We never checked the level, and never got an account set up with the gas company. We've been running off the little taste the builder put in the tank in order to get everything running for us, assuming there was some magical propane fairy who would come around and top things off on a schedule, or there was a sensor somewhere would gently prod us when things got low. Nope!
Took the guy till 5:30 to show up and fill the tank (t'was a busy day for him). And we had to pay an extra $90 to get our tank filled on a Sunday. Crap!
But, now we know!
About a 2 years after we moved into our first (and current) house we had some weird flooding in the basement in a single room when we were out of town. “Weird” because there were glasses in cabinets 24″ off the floor with water in them, and yet there was no flooding in any other room.
We finally figured out one of the window wells in that room had flooded with the water coming through and cascading down the shelves, including into the glasses. Turned out neither of us knew enough about home ownership to get the gutters cleaned on regular basis (or at all)….
yipes. that sucks.
we never had the gutters cleaned in our old house because… there were no trees anywhere. this house is surrounded by tall trees and the gutters were absolutely full before we even moved in. we had them cleaned last month. but next year, we’re getting gutter covers installed.
Yep, something very similar happened to us for the same reason.