One week ago, on Sunday, I found the floor of my airing cupboard upstairs (where the hot water tank was located) soaking wet, and the leaking water had stained the ceiling of the kitchen, below.
I turned off the water where it comes into the house, and then turned on the taps (faucets) to drain all the water from the tanks. For a couple of days, we had no water, hot or cold; and no central heating.
Once things had dried out, I did some experiments and found the leak was only from the hot water system, so I was able to isolate just that and restore cold water and central heating.
I decided rather than just replace the leaking hot water tank, I'd get rid of it, plus the feeder tanks in the loft (there were three) and by changing my boiler (american furnace) to the newer "combi" type it would work everything and eliminate all the tanks. The old boiler (furnace) was 25+ years old, so likely to fail soon anyhow - also the newer ones are supposed to be more efficient and consume less natural gas.
I found an engineer prepared to do the job at short notice, and yesterday (Saturday during Easter weekend) he was here all day till about 9pm (no water or heating again while he worked). He somehow managed to spill another gallon or two of water into my kitchen ceiling, and this morning I discovered puddles of water inside a kitchen cupboard well away from the ceiling leak. That cupboard leak was easy for me to fix once I found where it was coming from (a leaking drain valve on one of the water pipes - I guess the engineer must have used that valve for something, and neglected to close it off properly afterwards).
We now have working hot and cold water and central heating. The engineer is due to return Tuesday to flush out the old radiator water and add some anti-corrosion chemicals to the fresh radiator water. He also still has to fit a new timer and thermostat.
So my house is now tankless, and my bank account is about £4000 lighter.
