Through the Home Depot 800 number, I bought a gas water heater and its installation. A 40 gal. heater with installation came to $720 in all. Home Depot dispatched a plumber who works for Delta Plumbing. After looking over the furnace and attic, he wrote up every problem that, in his words, needed correcting to pass city code. Among them was a roof vent that was too short. His estimate for repairing everything was another $850, so a water heater with installation would end up at $1770!
I called off the installation and paid the $50.00 charge that cannot be refunded. When the plumber had gone, I climbed into the attic and discovered that the pipes had been taken apart. After I joined them again, the vent through the roof stood roughly triple the height it had when he showed it to me. Maybe the pipes had simply come loose by accident, I thought. Then I checked a photo taken 2 months earlier, and the vent looked fine in it. Why this plumber did that is beyond me. I am naive enough that he could have fed me a stack of falsehoods about the necessary work and I would probably have accepted them, so there was no need for him to disconnect anything.
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