Ask This Old House | Tankless Heater, Retaining Wall (S16 E11) | FULL EPISODE

today on ask this old house 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 let you keep your chimney direct fence to outside gives you plenty of hot water and saves a lot in operating costs sound good that sounds fabulous 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 then push it along and make my cut and it is very easy just those two marks and you're off to the races 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 that's next on ask this old house [Music] hi there i'm kevin o'connor and welcome back to ask this old house we'd love to hear from you about your house so make sure you keep your letters and your emails 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 email we got oh about a failed retaining wall 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 so you would use a different stone to use the wrong stone certainly did yeah 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 right 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 yeah it helps retain no you're right and i definitely don't want to go back with that color so look at the team working on this huh so who's actually going to do the house call i'm going to run over and check it out yeah look all right well mark's working on that we actually sent richard to milwaukee [Music] hello richard welcome to milwaukee nice to be back in your fair city how are you thanks for coming i love the house thank you uh it's built in 1905 and has some history to it it was built from the shores of lake michigan in the 20s they picked it up and brought it up here to create what is now south shore park she's a beauty thanks in the neighborhood they they call it the whale house because you can see the whale weather vein on top of the porch you know i don't know mark i don't think there's ever been a whale in lake michigan has there no but it makes a pretty cool weather it does now you email me about your water either i did right this way all right i'll follow you here's a hot water heater over here richard okay we bought the house two years ago the inspector warned us that uh there was no liner and maybe it was being vented improperly and causing deterioration in the brake yeah this is not a great basement for you no and as long as your heroes wanted you to raise it another six minutes maybe another day okay all right a little history lesson about venting when this house was built it probably would have been a coal-fired furnace here and back then there was plenty of temperature leaving that furnace and come out 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 flu would at least go right outside now as efficiency got improved on equipment what happens 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 uh 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 up so many people will now with 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've got all kinds of space and i can just to get more square footage here this is something you want to keep the chimney it's local cream city brick which is famous to milwaukee they don't make it anymore okay and we want to expose it maybe the second or third floor if you have a fireplace put in that would be cool we really like the character we like to look to all right cool so how about hot water do you have you want to keep the chimney you got enough hot water three uh three kids and my wife the five of us we've always had issues with it um it's always uh you know first person takes a shower the second person has got enough hot water and with three two two girls getting older you know we don't have much of it all right well you have got a 40 gallon tank type water heater it looks like it's been there 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 let you keep your chimney direct fence to outside gives you plenty of hot water and saves a lot in operating costs sound good that sounds fabulous want to tackle all your home improvement projects with confidence join this old house insider a new streaming service from this old house the iconic emmy-winning series that inspired a generation of home enthusiasts stream over 1 000 episodes of this old house and ask this old house commercial free watch it all in the this old house app and join live online q a's with our experts best of all you can try insider free for seven days to join go to thisoldhousemembership.com 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 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 yeah we have five people who live here richard is something this small gonna heat the water i know we run out of hot water pretty quickly 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's 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 exchanger here's what it looks like inside the hot flue gas is passed down through these fins you see the fins right here 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 that picks up that temperature and also that emitted that moisture now called condensate and now that thing passes through here and you can see the 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 which thankfully richard is a few years ago that's right now this unit it's going to cost more for the unit and installation is more involved because you've 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'll also last a long time i mean this is stainless steel and copper unlike a glass lined steel tank 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 percent at least what do you think that sounds great let's get that old water heater out of here [Music] we'll use this battery-powered pump to drain the water unit and while it drains i can break the gas and water connections [Music] [Music] local plumber larry boudiak is giving us a hand with this installation we have to run a new one-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 [Music] beautiful [Music] [Applause] the hot and cold water lines are three-quarter 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 it's an expansion tank anytime 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 would 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 as up and down arrows 108 110 115 120 whatever you need pretty easy all right so what do you think and all the space crazy with the wall hung unit it's all here we got rid of the water heater we actually plugged up the flue connection to the chimney and also cleaned up the piping as you won't get you had any i'm blown away 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 and has to bring on the burner and they complain about a cold water sandwich you know having to drain some of that water 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 bi-metallic element inside here that can open and 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 re-circ 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 yep feel it i can feel getting hotter isn't that cool it is all 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 turn you're wasting water come on go ahead richard you're the best thanks for coming to milwaukee thank you you're a great help 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 can waste the cold water 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 pump but as we get houses where bathrooms way over here another one's 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 yeah so it starts to kind of like work again it's a whole catch-22 you can save water but waste more energy so what we always have to have on these research systems are some smart controls this one had a timer right 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 when you come into the bathroom close it the pump will come on just then that's kind of like an occupant another one has a little wireless wi-fi or bluetooth walk-in to take a shower and you know you'll have the hot water 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 right so think about if that bronze pump is on and there's no nothing open and the crossover valve didn't exist it wouldn't do anything the pump would just pump against the dead head spinning the water would go no absolutely so now this this is available it's a one-way check valve in it the water goes through yeah right and then all of a sudden where's 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 father's fixture so that there's hot water available at the father's fixture 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 there's only one place it can go right back to the water heater that's brilliant yeah nice all right good information all right now you can watch this old house and ask this old house anytime anywhere download our new app to stream full episodes to your tablet your tv and your phone binge classic episodes catch up on recent renovations and get step-by-step help projects all around the house best of all it's free the most trusted home improvement information is now available on amazon fire tv roku apple tv ios and android devices download the thistle house streaming app today tommy i know you love your circular saws one of the most versatile tools in the shop or on the job site 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 right because you're probably cross cutting or ripping something and a straight edge is a great way to get one of those exactly so if you put a mark at let's say five inches and i put my straight edge 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 right which means if you want to cut something that's five inches you need two measurements you need the five inches and then you've got to adjust in this in this case it would be another inch and a sixteenth so i'd have to place it at 6 and a 16. i place it on the marks clamp it take my saw run it down make sure it's tight to the to the straight edge and have a nice straight cut 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 straight edges because now we've got these things called track saws yeah a track star is i take my let's say five 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 it once on position then push it along make my cut and it is very easy just those two marks and you're off to the races exactly 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 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 you put it on your marks so same idea right on your mark right on your mark allowing for the thickness of the blade yeah and which piece you want this company makes a base that you can mount on the base of a saw so you can take your existing circular saw and retrofit it exactly beautiful 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 so we're not buying a new circular saw and roughly what is this contraption cost uh you're probably looking at 75 80 well that's not bad at all all right and then of course there's always the tried and true method which is you can just make your own and i did it for years where you just take a couple of scrap pieces of wood in this case two pieces a quarter inch i've ripped down one roughly at 10 inches the other one at two inches then i just take my saw now and i'll follow that along on this side right 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 look at that great tips tommy as always thank you my pleasure [Music] whoa scott kelly hi mark hi mark hey i've been on the site for two seconds and i can already see what you guys emailed me about yeah so we moved in about a year ago uh 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 uh but not too big a deal flash forward a year from now through the winter now the sides are falling apart uh we've tried to patch it where we can but we're really not sure what we're gonna do about it we're worried the whole thing's about to collapse right so eventually it will go so glad you emailed but uh 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 are they're really designed for something else uh maybe rim a tree maybe border your driveway you see that lip right there not really 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 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 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 that's great 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 a hostas so we have some room to work [Music] once the old pavers are out we need to dig back a few inches and give ourselves more room to work you just want to make a nice clean path yeah does this all need to be cutting uh i don't know yeah all that all that should come out in that pile okay guys so now we've dug down we've got rid of the wall we've dug back to give ourselves plenty of room to work and uh as i've been digging i did discover that the first person who built this wall did use gravel uh 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 why is having more gravel better more gravel is better because it helps with the drainage again the big problem with this wall is that it had no drainage so anytime 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 [Music] okay guys so this is the new material it's a nice concrete block it's good uh as you can see much bigger much stronger than what we had originally yeah a lot bigger okay another difference is you can see these two channels we're just gonna pop this little horizontal connector into that channel i think you can see one on the other side right there yep that makes the wall a lot stronger look at how that doesn't move yeah so also guys notice the color okay we found this color in the original so we kind of mixed that in with the gray and came up with this yeah it'll look nice with our house too yeah good okay okay we're gonna bury the first course about halfway to keep it level i will set a block every six feet or so and level those to each other get it out of the groove onto the block [Music] this fabric liner will keep dirt and contaminants away from the gravel [Music] 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 [Music] 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 preparations 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 there you go [Music] the final course is going to be this cap which will secure with construction adhesive [Music] it'll hide the grooves and give the wall a nice finished look all right guys while we finally get the wall up you guys put your plants back in they look great thank you look this looks really really good it's a huge improvement over what we have all right great spot 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 hope you enjoy it thank you so much all right see you soon see ya [Music] next time on ask this old house in nashville i'll show you how to turn an original door into a dutch door after seven years we feel like the landscaping needs just a little bit of updating and we've got a particular problem over here sometimes you can get a whole new look in your yard without buying any plants and i'll show you how and if you hear a gurgle at your sink it's not a good sign thanks for watching this whole house has got a video for just about every home improvement project so be sure to check out the others and if you like what you see click on the subscribe button make sure 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Channel: This Old House

Views: 244,431

Keywords: This Old House, Ask This Old House, DIY, Home Improvement, DIY Ideas, Renovation, Renovation Ideas, How To Fix, How To Install, How To Build, Plumbing, HVAC, Tools, Foundations, track saw, water heater, circular saw, concrete block, retaining wall, rebuild

Id: bOKHotBdg5o

Length: 24min 29sec (1469 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020