Yeah, the title is clickbaity. I did that on purpose.
Anyway, so I had a one year introductory offer with Spectrum for my Internet, and it expired this month. I like to save money, so I was going to research other service providers in my area, and found one that is offering 1gb fiber with some nifty discounts - in the end, I’ll be getting more than twice the speed for much less than Spectrum.
Fast forward to today, the installation date, and the service guy peeks his head through my back door (so not to track dirt into the house) and says, “you’ve got to see this.” I knew something was wrong. Before he showed me the problem, he said he was a volunteer firefighter and a vet, and not even he would work under my house.
At that point I knew exactly what the problem could be: mold. Apparently somewhere up the line from my water heater is a significant leak. This was obvious because the amount of water pouring off the end of the pipe. Also notable was the water drops across the insulation and joists. Looking a little deeper, and there is a shit ton of mold.
So I turned my water off, and now I’m waiting for a mold remediation company to come out and a) dry out my crawl space and 2) get rid of the mold, so that I can get a plumber in to find and fix the leak, and I can then get my new internet installed.
The really weird part is that my water bill has been unaffected by the leak.
So how’s y’all’s week going so far? 🥺
Water heaters are the worst. Nefarious bastards. I’m sorry you’re going through this. For everyone else reading - GO BUY A LEAK DETECTOR. It can be a smart one, it can be one that just beeps loudly like a smoke alarm. GO DO IT FOR YOUR WATER HEATER TOMORROW.
Water heaters are the devil and will either a) leak quietly as OP is seeing or b) just have something burst and you won’t notice until your basement/lower floor is completely flooded. (My experience). Both would have been solved with a simple leak detector. Just go do it. They’re at home Depot, Amazon, wherever.