Ask This Old House

Kevin

Today, on "Ask This Old House"...

Richard

Many people wait for the water heater to fail, and, all of sudden, they panic and have to get hot water that night. What I'm going to propose to you is that we change this out to a type of system that let's you keep your chimney, direct vents to outside, give you plenty of hot water, and saves a lot in operating costs. Sound good?

Mark

That sounds fabulous.

Richard

All right.

Tom

And I'll show you a few tricks on how to get more out of a basic circular saw. Take the saw, put it down, and push it along to make my cut.

Kevin

And it is very easy, just those two marks, and you're off to the races.

Mark

This wall probably looked great when it went in a few years ago. Right now, not too good. I'm going to show you what went wrong and how to fix it.

Kevin

That's next on "Ask This Old House." Hi, there. I'm Kevin O'Connor. And welcome back to "Ask This Old House," where we love to hear from you about your house, so make sure you keep your letters and your e-mails coming. You never know who's going to answer your question or how many people are going to answer your question because you three are working on an e-mail we got -- oh -- about a failed retaining wall.

Mark

Yeah, it's a block retaining wall, a lot of things that I see right in this picture right here that I just don't like, starting with the material.

Mm-hmm. -Kevin

So you would use a different stone?

They used the wrong stone. -Mark

Certainly did. Joe?

Joe

One thing I want you to look at is drainage. I've had the same problem, the wall falling out, because it was improper drainage behind the wall.

Mark

Right.

Jen

So you're obviously picking a new block, so pay attention to the color. Pick a nice blend that's going to go with the house, and bring the wall up a little bit higher

so that it helps retain better. -Mark

Yeah. No, you're right. And I definitely don't want to go back with that color, so...

Kevin

Look at the team working on this, huh? So who's actually going to do the house call?

Mark

I'm going to run over and check it out, yeah.

You got it. -Mark

I'm going to go look.

Kevin

All right. Well, while Mark is working on that, we actually sent Richard to Milwaukee.

Mark

Hello, Richard. Welcome to Milwaukee.

Richard

Nice to be back in your fair city. How are you?

Mark

Thanks for coming.

Richard

I love the house.

Mark

Thank you. It was built in 1905. It has some history to it. It was built on the shores of Lake Michigan, and in the '20s, they picked it up and brought it up here to create what is now South Shore Apartments.

Richard

Well,

she's a beauty. -Mark

Thanks. In the neighborhood, they call it the Whale House because you can see the whale weather vain on top of the porch.

Richard

You know, I don't know, Mark. I don't think there's ever been a whale in Lake Michigan, has there?

Mark

No, but it makes a pretty cool weather vane.

Richard

It does. Now, you e-mailed me about your water heater.

Mark

I did. Right this way.

Richard

All right. I'll follow you.

Mark

Here's the hot water heater over here, Richard.

Richard

Okay.

Mark

We bought the house two years ago, and the inspector warned us that there was no liner and maybe it was being vented improperly and causing deterioration of the brick.

Richard

Okay. Yeah, this is not a great basement for you, is it?

Mark

No, and as long as you're here, what would it be to raise it another 6 inches?

Richard

Maybe another day.

Okay. -Richard

All right. A little history lesson about venting. When this house was built, there probably would have been a coal-fired furnace here. And back then, there was plenty of temperature leaving that furnace and coming up into the chimney, so whether or not that chimney was lined or not didn't matter. That chimney was hot all winter long, and all the temperature and all the moisture in flue would, at least, go right outside. Now, as efficiency got improved on equipment, what happened is it meant more heat went into the house and less went into the chimney. Okay? So now, there was issues where it started to cause rot away from the inside. They take the furnace, the new, modern furnace, it's so efficient, you don't even need to vent it into the chimney anymore. Now, we're stuck with just this water heater with a tiny flue with nothing but a little bit of temperature but plenty of moisture that can get in there and rot that brick from the inside out. So many people will now, when they have a tank-type water heater like this, might put a power venter here and push the flue products to outside. You've already got a really efficient furnace that vents to outside, and once that happens, now the chimney can go away. People say, "Oh, look. I got all kinds of space," to get more square footage here.

Mark

This is something we want to keep.

Richard

The chimney?

Mark

It's local, Cream City brick, which is famous to Milwaukee.

They don't make it anymore. -Richard

Okay.

Mark

And we want to expose it, maybe the second or third floor if we ever have a fireplace put in.

That would be cool. -Mark

We really like the character,

we like the look to it. -Richard

All right. Cool. So how about hot water? Do you have it? You want to keep the chimney. You got enough hot water?

Mark

Three kids and my wife, the five of us, we've always had issues with it. It's always, you know, first person takes a shower, the second person doesn't get enough hot water. And with three, two girls getting older, you know,

we don't have much of it. -Richard

All right. Well, you have got a 40-gallon tank-type water heater. It looks like it's been here for about five years. It's a nine-year warranty. It's got some life left in it. You don't have to do anything right now. And many people wait for the water heater to fail, and, all of a sudden, they panic and have to get hot water that night. What I'm going to propose to you is that we change this out to a type of system that lets you keep your chimney, direct vents to outside, gives you plenty of hot water, and saves a lot in operating costs. Sound good?

Mark

That sounds fabulous.

Richard

All right. All right, so what I want to get installed for you today is a thing called an on-demand water heater, also called the instantaneous water heater. It's pretty much the standard way to make hot water in all of Asia and most of Europe. It's only about -- It's less than 10% of the U.S. market, but it's growing every day, with good reason.

Mark

Yeah, we have five people who live here, Richard. Is something this small going to heat the water? I know we run out of hot water pretty quickly.

Richard

You know, it will because it heats water so fundamentally differently. A tank-type water heater sits there all day long with a burner underneath a tank, and it's on and off trying to keep that water at 120, whether or not you're here or not or whether you need hot water. What this does is it heats the water only when you need it. When you open up a faucet, then and only then does it come on. Now, it looks a little confusing, but what happens inside this is there is a gas pipe to it. Here's the gas burners. There's a fan. It pushes the flue products, when this burner comes on, down through this heat exchange, and here's what it looks like inside. The hot flue gases pass down through these fins. You see the fins right here? It extracts every bit of the heat it can, and it transfers it into the copper water pipes. Now, the water pipes go back and forth, back and forth. Now, that has cold water passing through it that soon becomes hot, so by the time it passes through this primary heat exchanger, you've extracted a lot of the temperature. But remember, I talked about the moisture that's in there? At this point, underneath it, there's a secondary heat exchanger that now picks up -- You see it right here?

Mark

Mm-hmm.

Richard

That picks up that temperature and also that humidity, that moisture, now called condensate, and now, that thing passes through here. And you can see the water that you've already heated continues through another heat exchanger here, extracting even more. And by the time it gets done, you've got almost all the energy you put into this transferred into the water that comes out through the faucet, so you'll actually have enough hot water for your soon-to-be teenage daughters.

Mark

Which, thankfully, Richard, is a few years away.

Richard

That's right. Now, this unit. It's going to cost more for the unit, and installation is more involved because you got to get a larger gas line to it because when that burner comes on, it uses more gas during that period. And you're going to have electrical to it, you're going to have to direct-vent it, and the hot and the cold has to come over to it, but it's worth it. This unit will give you unlimited hot water. It will also last a long time. I mean, this is stainless steel and copper, unlike a glass-lined steel tank that you have to change every five to seven to nine years. And the other thing is it's going to save you a lot of energy, about 30% at least. What do you think?

Mark

That sounds great.

Richard

All right. Let's get that old water heater out of there. We'll use this battery-powered pump to drain the water heater, and while it drains, I can break the gas and water connections. Local plumber Larry Budiac is giving us a hand with this installation. We have to run a new 1-inch gas pipe from the gas meter to the new water heater. The fresh-air intake and exhaust pipes are nested together in a concentric pipe, which means one hole on the outside of the house. Okay. Beautiful. Love it. The hot and cold water lines are 3/4-inch copper pipes. All right, Mark. Time to take you through your new unit. We've got gas line run to the new unit with a shutoff valve. We've tested it. We've purged it, and that's ready to go. We've got a new cold water line that comes from where the old water heater was right here. You can see this blue thing. That's an expansion tank. Any time we heat up water, we need a place for it to expand. It comes in here. The hot water goes the other way back and connects onto your plumbing system. Right here is an important safety valve. This is a temperature- and pressure-relief valve that we relieve if the pressure was ever too high. This little line right here is actually a condensate line. There's not much left except a little bit of that water, and that goes to the floor drain over there. And then we've got -- The exhaust is done. Combustion air to be burned here, exhaust going out right there through that pipe. And this is the control panel to set the temperature. Pretty easy, there's up and down arrows -- 108, 110, 115, 120, whatever you need. Pretty easy. All right. So what do you think?

And all the space. -Richard

Crazy. With a wall-hung unit, it's all here. We get rid of the water heater. We actually plugged up the flue connection to the chimney and also cleaned up the piping so you won't hit your head anymore.

Mark

I'm blown away,

Richard. -Richard

All right. Now, there's one more thing I want to show you upstairs. All right. So up here in the master bathroom, when you had a water heater downstairs, it was on all day. It meant that the heated water conducted up here, so anytime you open the faucet, you had hot water. Well, with a unit like you've got now, when it's off, it's off, and so the pipe between here and there can actually get cool. So what happens is people run it. It has to bring on the burner, and they complain about a cold water sandwich, you know,

having to drain some of that water. -Mark

Yeah.

Richard

Well, we found a couple of ways to get around that. This unit has a bronze recirculation pump on it that will be able to pump water. It has a timer, so you could set it for the times you might need hot water, morning and night. And it works in concert with this, a really interesting valve called a crossover valve. You can see that it's connected between the hot water supply from the water heater and the cold water supply up to the faucet. And inside, it has a bimetallic element inside here that can open or close based on temperature. In normal mode, hot water comes up here and goes up to the faucet, but if it's cool, it opens, and when it does, it would bring on that recirc pump down in the basement, and it would then push some of that water across over into the cold water side bringing on the burner downstairs, meaning you're going to put the water back into the cold water side instead of wasting it down the drain. And that means you'll always have hot water here at the faucet. All right. Time for the test. Turn it on.

Mark

Yep.

Richard

Feel it?

Mark

I can feel it getting hotter.

Richard

Isn't that cool?

Mark

It is.

Richard

Or warm? All right. So you can actually leave that faucet on for as long as you want -- all day. You're never going to run out of hot water, but don't. You're wasting water. Come on. Go ahead.

Mark

Richard, you're the best. Thanks for coming to Milwaukee.

Richard

Thank you. You were a great help.

Kevin

I know you're a big fan of those on-demand hot water heaters. I guess the only knock we've ever heard is that you do have to wait for the hot water to show up. You open the faucet, you could waste the cold water.

Richard

Right. Now, this house was a perfect candidate for one of these systems because it had two bathrooms right over the unit. You didn't really need to think about a recirculation line or a pump, but we get houses where a bathroom is way over here, another one is way over here. You have to have some way to circulate that water through so you don't have to waste that water down the drain. Now, every time that pump is on, the recirculation pump, you have the burners on, as well.

Kevin

Yeah, so it starts to kind of, like, work against you.

Richard

It's a whole catch 22. You can save water but waste more energy, so we always have to have one of these recirc systems or some smart controls.

This one had a timer. -Kevin

Right.

Richard

It comes on in the morning or at night, but there's others that have a little bayonet switch that can go into the bathroom door. When you come into the bathroom and close it, the pump will come on just then.

Kevin

Oh, it's kind of like an occupancy switch.

Richard

Another one has a little wireless Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

Kevin

Walk in to take a shower, push the button.

Richard

That's right. And you know you'll have the hot water.

Kevin

Yeah, very clever. So, in that case, the circulating pump comes on, pushes the hot water up to that faucet, and it goes through that beautiful little valve.

Really cool. -Kevin

Right?

Richard

Think about it -- If that bronze pump is on and there's nothing open and the crossover valve didn't exist, it wouldn't do anything. The pump would just pump against a dead head.

The water would go nowhere. -Richard

Absolutely. So now, this is available, it's a one-way check valve in it.

The water goes through. -Kevin

Yeah.

Richard

Right? And then, all of a sudden, where does it go? It goes to a weird place. It actually goes backwards down through the cold water line, and what it's going to do is actually complete a loop at the farthest fixture so that there's hot water available at the farthest fixture.

Kevin

That's the thing that blows my mind, that even though it goes into the cold water line, it ends up back at that tank because it can only go where there is no water.

Richard

There's only one place it can go -- right back to the water heater.

Kevin

That's brilliant. Nice. Good information.

Richard

All right.

Kevin

Tommy, I know you love your circular saws, one of the most versatile tools in the shop or on the jobsite.

Tom

We use them a lot every day. And whenever you're using a circular saw, you want to make sure that your cuts are always straight.

Kevin

Right, because you're probably cross-cutting or ripping something, and a straight edge is a great way to get one of those.

Tom

Exactly. So if you put a mark at, let's say, 5 inches and I put my straightedge on that mark on this end and this end, now, I can't really follow that, get that cut, because the saw is up on top. I have to allow for the offset of the bed in relationship to the saw blade.

Kevin

Right, which means if you want to cut something that's 5 inches, you need two measurements. You need the 5 inches, and then you've got to adjust.

Tom

In this case, it would be another inch and a sixteenth, so I'd have to place it at 6 and a 16.

Kevin

Yeah.

Tom

I place it on the marks, clamp it, take my saw, run it down, make sure it's tight to the straightedge, and have a nice, straight cut.

Kevin

And if you were cutting the other way, you've got a different-size offset. So it's not the hardest thing in the world, but we have come a long way with straightedges because now we've got these things called track saws.

Tom

Yeah. A track saw is I take my, let's say, 5-inch measurement, and depending on which piece I want, I have to allow for the thickness of the blade, but I place it on the mark here. Place it on the mark there. I don't have to clamp it. Take the saw, put it down, make sure it doesn't move once I'm positioned, and push it along, make my cut.

Kevin

And it is very easy. Just those two marks and you're off to the races.

Tom

Exactly.

Kevin

The only knock that I've ever heard on these things is that they're pricey. You got to buy a special saw and the track, and it can cost hundreds of dollars.

Tom

Yeah, and they save you a lot of time. But here's another one right here that you can -- Actually, it's a track saw.

You place it down. -Kevin

Mm-hmm.

Tom

You put it on your marks.

Kevin

It's the same idea -- right on your mark.

Tom

Right on your mark, allowing for the thickness of the blade and which piece you want.

This company makes a base... -Kevin

Oh.

Tom

...that you can mount on the base of a saw.

Kevin

So you can take your existing circular saw and retrofit it.

Exactly. -Kevin

Beautiful.

Tom

So this is a sled that it will slide on, and I just take it, put it on there. And now, I can slide along and make my cut.

Kevin

So we're not buying a new circular saw. And, roughly, what does this contraption cost?

Tom

Oh, you're probably looking at $75, $80.

Kevin

Oh, that's not bad at all. All right. And then, of course, there's always the tried-and-true method, which is you could just make your own.

Tom

And I did it for years, where you just take a couple of scrap pieces of wood. In this case, two pieces of 1/4-inch. I've ripped down one, roughly, at 10 inches,

the other one at 2 inches. -Kevin

Mm-hmm.

Tom

Then I just take my saw now, and I'll follow that along on this side.

Right. -Tom

And I'll spin it around, and I'll follow it on this side. So what I've done is I've just made a custom track for that saw. Now all I have to do is put it on the line down here, put it on a line down here, clamp it, and make a cut.

Kevin

Look at that. Great tips, Tommy, as always.

Thank you. -Tom

My pleasure.

Mark

Whoa. Scott, Kelly.

Scott

Hey,

Mark. Good to see you. -Kelly

Hi, Mark.

Mark

I've been on the site for two seconds... and I can already see what you guys e-mailed me about.

Yeah. -Scott

Yeah. So we moved in about a year ago.

Okay. Scott

And one of the things the inspector pointed out was that he thought the retaining wall was built with the wrong type of bricks. At the time, it was leaning a little bit but not too big a deal. Flash forward a year from now, through the winter, now the sides are falling apart. We've tried to patch it where we can, but we're really not sure what we're going to do about it.

Kelly

We're worried the whole thing is about to collapse.

Mark

Right. So eventually, it will go, so, glad you e-mailed. But a few obvious things that I see right off the bat is the paver stone. Although it's good quality and built pretty well, these pavers aren't -- They're really designed for something else -- maybe rim a tree, maybe border your driveway. You see that lip right there? Not really enough to bear, not really good for this application. As you guys can see, we're retaining a lot of land. We're retaining -- you know, like, it captures water. Even if you guys look up to your neighbor's house, you can see that, you know, he's 30,

35 feet in the air above you guys. -Kelly

Mm-hmm.

Mark

So, as you know, everything runs downhill. That whole hill, all that pressure, is bearing down on this wall, and that's why we see the bulging and all the inconsistencies in the wall, and that's what we're here to do is alleviate that pressure, give you a new wall, and go from there.

Okay. Good. -Scott

Sounds great.

Mark

So what I want to do is rebuild the wall with the right material. While I go get that, why don't you guys pull the hostas so we have some room to work? Once the old pavers are out, we'll need to dig back a few inches and give ourselves more room to work.

Scott

You just want to make a nice, clean path basically?

Mark

Yeah.

Kelly

Does this all need to be cut in?

Scott

I don't know.

Mark

Yeah,

all that. -Kelly

All that should come out?

Mark

Right in that pile.

Kelly

Okay.

Mark

Okay, guys. So, now we've dug down, we've gotten rid of the wall. We've dug back to give ourselves plenty of room to work. And as I've been digging, I did discover that the first person who built this wall did use gravel. They didn't use nearly enough, so we're going to continue to dig down. We're going to add more gravel. We're going to take that first course of block in. We're going to bury that in the driveway for more stability, and then we're going to add gravel to the back of the wall, as well.

Kelly

Why is having more gravel better?

Mark

More gravel is better because it helps with the drainage. Again, the big problem with this wall is that it had no drainage, so any time the water would come down the hill, it would build up behind the wall, create ice, and push that wall all over the place as we saw it. The more gravel, the better. The water comes through the gravel, dissipates through the block and into the driveway, and we don't have any buildup. Okay, guys. So this is the new material. It's a nice concrete block.

Scott

Looks good.

Mark

As you can see, much bigger, much stronger than what we had originally.

Kelly

Yeah,

a lot bigger. -Mark

Okay? Another difference is you can see these two channels. We're just going to pop this little horizontal connector into that channel. I think you can see one on the other side right there.

Kelly

Yep.

Mark

That males the wall a lot stronger. Look at how that doesn't move.

Yeah. -Scott

Got it.

Mark

So also, guys, notice the color, okay, and we found this color in the original, so we kind of mixed that in with the gray and came up with this.

Kelly

Yeah, it will look nice with our house, too.

Mark

Yeah. Good. Okay. Okay, we're going to bury the first course about halfway. To keep it level, I will set a block every 6 feet or so and level those to each other. Get it out of the groove onto the block, yeah. This fabric liner will keep dirt and contaminants away from the gravel. Then, I can set a string line to guide the level and the face of the rest of the course. Then, we can backfill with more gravel. To lay the second course, we need to line up the channels, but we want to make sure the joints on the face of the wall don't line up. All right, guys. So now that we have the second course up, what we want to do is we want to install this perforated pipe in the back behind the wall. As you can see, this pipe has perforations all the way around it to catch and disperse water. It will act as a second line of defense just in case the gravel gets clogged with dirt or other contaminants. Once the pipe is in and we've backfilled with more gravel, we can start the third course.

Scott

Oh, bad boy dropped right in.

Kelly

There we go.

Mark

The final course is going to be this cap, which we'll secure with construction adhesive. It'll hide the grooves and give the wall a nice, finished look. All right, guys. Well, we finally got the wall up. You guys put your plants back in.

They look great. -Kelly

Thank you.

Scott

This looks really, really good. It's a huge improvement over what we had before.

Mark

All right. Great, Scott. Not only does it look good, but what we did behind the wall with the drainage, the gravel, the pipe, all that, that's going to make this wall stand up for a long, long time, so I hope you enjoy it.

Thank you so much. -Scott

Thank you so much.

Mark

All right. See you soon.

Kelly

See you.

Kevin

Next time on "Ask This Old House"...

Tom

In Nashville, I'll show you how to turn an original door into a dutch door.

Man

After seven years, we feel like the landscaping needs just a little bit of updating, and we've got a particular problem over here.

Jen

Sometimes you can get a whole new look in your yard without buying any plants, and I'll show you how.

Richard

And if you hear a gurgle at your sink, it's not a good sign.