If you are an avid DIY-er, it doesn’t take much time before you reach that place where you are pretty confident in your ability to tackle almost any task in your home. With every DIY challenge you accept, your know-how grows. Even if you make mistakes along the way, if you don’t let them stop you, those mistakes only serve to sharpen your capabilities.
But…
Before you do any DIY task in your home, warns IPM, it is still important to always ask yourself if it is something you should do yourself or leave it to a licensed professional. Being able to tell when to do a task yourself and when to let an expert do it is what makes the difference between a reckless DIY-er (who takes unnecessary risks) and the informed DIY-er (who takes calculated risks based on complete information).
This is important because when doing a DIY in your home, your focus should not just be on your ability to do the task or how much money you will save. In addition to your budget and your ability to do the job, you must consider other factors.
Always ask yourself these questions before you undertake a DIY task in your home:
- Does this job require access to materials or knowledge only a licensed professional will have?
- Is it worth investing money to buy the specialty tools or equipment (things you might never use afterward) needed for the job?
- Is it dangerous (what are the risks to me, my family, and my home) or illegal to do this task alone?
- How much time would it take me versus the time it would take an expert? Does it make financial sense to spend my time on this task?
- If an accident happens while I am doing this task, how will it affect my insurance?
Why you should not install a new water heater by yourself
Installing a new water heater in your home is one of those tasks you should not attempt to do by yourself. Even if you are comfortable with fixing plumbing issues in your home, you should not do this task yourself. Water heaters are vital to the function of your home, and one wrong move could cause you a lot of trouble.
Installing a new water heater is not as simple as buying a new unit, unplugging the old one, and then plugging in the new unit. This job can get complicated very quickly. If you are thinking of installing a new water heater in your home and toying with the idea of doing the installation yourself, here are some excellent reasons why that is a bad idea.
You may buy the wrong water heater
Although it does not make sense, a 50-gallon water heater is actually cheaper than a 40-gallon water heater, even though the 50-gallon unit is clearly bigger. The simple reason is that there is more demand for 50-gallon water heaters, so the manufacturing costs are lower. This is just one of the little things you may not know when purchasing your water heater.
The new unit will be different
The new unit may be a different size from the old one. Your old unit will likely be more than ten years old. Since you installed it, much has changed in how water heaters are built and installed. Unlike you, a professional plumber has the latest information about the new systems and how to install them.
You may not have the necessary tools and skills
When installing a new water heater, there are a lot of unexpected things that come up. For instance, you may have to install a new gas line because the gas line for the new one does not align with the previous one. Sometimes you need to extend or reduce the pipes that connect to the water heater due to the differences in size between the old and new ones. These are just some of the hiccups that can occur.
You could waste a lot of time
To install the new water heater, you have to go through the whole process of learning how to install the system, making mistakes in the installation, testing the water heater, discovering your mistakes, and eventually correcting them. This could take days, and in that time, your home would be without hot water. Conversely, it takes an expert only a few hours.
You could lose much money
If you install the water heater incorrectly, there is always a chance of your home getting flooded. Given that you are not a licensed plumber and do not have a plumbing permit, that could complicate your insurance. Even if you managed to avoid this problem now, the fact that a licensed plumber did not do the work could come back to bite you when you want to sell the home.
Now, knowing all this, are you willing to go to all this trouble to save a few hundred dollars?