Hot, Hot, Hot!

One of the advantages of being married to a home inspector is that when something goes wrong around the house, he can almost certainly determine the cause of the problem and he'll know how to fix it. (Even if he's not able to fix it himself, he'll know who to call.)

So Saturday as I was cleaning up the bathroom, I noticed that the tap on Mark's sink was really hot. I'd never noticed that before. I needed to have Mark take a look.

He was busy reviewing reports but came upstairs to investigate right away.

"Hmmm. You weren't running the hot water?"

"No, I wasn't running the water. See? Feel the one on my sink. It's cold."

He looked at both sinks. He looked under his sink. Nothing appeared to be wrong and he wanted to avoid trampling the insulation in the attic which would be required to look at it from the other side of the wall. We were just going to keep an eye on it.

I went back to cleaning the sink. The tap was still hot. It was "burn your hand if you hold on too long" hot. I went back into the office.

"I think you need to get out the infrared camera and look at it. It's really, really hot."

Dutiful husband that he is, he got out the infrared camera and took it upstairs.

He scanned the area. "Look, the hot water pipe is hot, the cold water pipe is not. Just what I'd expect. Are you sure you weren't running the hot water?"

I was positive. Maybe. But given the fact that the tap cooled off and felt the same as the other one, in a relatively short period of time - I'm going to have to assume that it was "user error". I can only surmise that I was having so much fun cleaning that sink that I didn't even notice I was running the hot water. Thank goodness I didn't call a plumber!