Do you have any idea just how heavy a hot water heater can be?  this dude I knew in Raleigh, N.C. found out the hard way. 

A long-time property owner with a lot on his plate, he often called up a local Raleigh plumbing shop for even the tiniest jobs.  But one day, when one of the main heaters in his prize building conked out, it turned out the plumber he had on speed dial was off skiing in the Andes.

No problem, he thought to himself.  I’ll just roll in there and swap out the unit with a new one from Lowes.

Except that it was a problem. First, he had a lot of trouble unhooking the hoses.  Then, he ended up wrestling with the darn thing for the better part of an hour.  Which would have been okay, except he called me in to help him.

Between the both of us, we eventually got the heater up on the truck and off to the dump, but in the process, we learned a lot about that kind of little detail.  Specifically, if you’ve got someone like a Raleigh plumber who will volunteer to do that stuff for you, take them up on it.  When you factor in time spent getting the hoses on and off, buying new appliances, running out to the dump, and most of all, dragging the thing around, you’re definitely best off paying off someone else to take care of it.

Sure, you can persist in the idea that just because you hauled something heavy up a flight of stairs, you earned your “daily bread”…or you can get smart and just call around.  So your usual plumber’s out?  That’s really okay: a lot more are available.  And that means you have no excuse for putting yourself through that kind of hassle.  Or asking your best friend to come along.

That, in fact, was the subject of a discussion that took most of that hour in the basement – discussion of all of the other things we could have been doing, punctuated by grunting, sighing and the occasional “No kidding!”…except that for some reason he kept calling me Sherlock.  Well, take this tip from Sherlock and go get yourself two or three Raleigh plumbers on speed dial.