Trouble in the plumbing

We have not had consistent hot water in my house for some time. Probably around a month. And while our house has serious issues causing this lack, the larger problem seems to be the plumbers. We've had quite a few of them to diagnose/fix the problem, and each time they say it's a different, more difficult issue. The main issue seems to be that plumbers only do a half-assed job, while we have a full-assed problem.

This all started with the receipt of our July gas bill. A $200 gas bill in the middle of the summer seemed a little odd. Well, a $200 gas bill at any time would be odd, in the middle of the summer it was outrageous. The only things in our house with gas power are the heater, which we were definitely not using, and the water heater. Enter Plumber #1. He determined that the thermostat of the water heater was broken. So we started turning off the water heater during the day, firing it up only in the evenings for our showers. A fine system, except I'm lazy and don't plan my showers 45 minutes in advance to allow the water to warm. I ended up with quite a few cold showers duirng that period.

Something was still fishy, so a second plumber came out. This one accused the first of being a quack. Can you charge plumbers with malpractice? By this point our water heater was obviously leaking. In fact, there was such a huge puddle around it, and the insulation was so soaked, it seemed that Plumber #1 must not have even looked at it to diagnose the "thermostat problem". Plumber #2 blamed the problem on the horribly hard water in Woodland, which thoroughly clogged up the water heater. He recommended selling the house and moving away. Given that that wasn't feasible, we had to replace the water heater. This was a bit of an ordeal itself. For an entire weekend, they'd already taken out the old water heater but hadn't yet installed the new one, eliminating even the possibility of hot water.

Let me interject about the coldness of cold water. It's amazingly cold. You'd think it would be sort of warm, considering it's over 100 degrees outside. But there's not even the glimmer of warmth in cold water. Just illustrates the incredible insulating properties of soil...

But I guess the new water heater wasn't cutting it either. (This section happened while I was on vacation.) Apparently we had another leak. This one under the house, in the pipe that supplies hot water to the entire house from the water heater. Plumber #2 had "checked" for such a leak by touching the floor to see if it felt warm. Oh yeah, real foolproof... Especially considering that the water heater had been off all day, so there was no real reason to expect the floor to be warm, even though I mentioned that the floor of my bathroom had been feeling warm lately. So Plumber #2 was a half-asser too. Jerk.

So now the contents of the hall closet are strewn throughout the house, and there are several holes cut into the closet wall to allow access to the pipes. And we're not allowed to use the hot water so that we don't leak still more water, compromising our house's foundation. And to make it even better, now that we've finally gotten the correct diagnosis, those slack-ass plumbers are refusing to come over and fix it. Sure, their schedules are abundantly clear when they screw around doing unnecessary things... They're probably so busy messing up at somebody else's house that they can't come fix the pipes at ours.

Oh well... Cold showers are kind of nice when it's so hot out. I just wish they weren't quite so cold.