Venting: Water heater
So for context, I work in the grooming salon. Near the end of last year our salon noticed that our water would start gradually getting colder while we bathed our dogs, until eventually one day the water dropped way too much hitting 60°F leading to us having to call in emergency maintenance and shutting down. There hasn’t really been a consistent trend of when it goes out but it would continue to do so at random. Last month we noticed that it was going out much much much more frequently and when it would start getting colder. If we had 3 dogs all in unison in the morning, the water heater would start freezing at 10am. If we got lucky enough to only have 1 dog in the morning it would start going out by 12pm.
The month of April alone we had to shut down the salon a total of 16 times, losing money and losing trust with our clients. No matter how many times we put in emergency tickets and talked to the higher ups about this being a persisting issue that was effecting us in a very negative way, they refused to replace the water heater even though we had a warranty.
NOTE: In having to shut down so frequently, our numbers dropped significantly and the higher ups were getting upset so we were put on the naughty list despite it not being our faults that nobody was taking the plausible solution to this problem.
The water heater was old and we had been sharing it with aquatics while the veterinarians had their own water heater. So whenever aquatics would have to use the water, our temp was dropping leading to another shutdown.
About 2 weeks ago we had to call in yet another repair which seemed to work…for a total of 3 days before it froze all over again. Well we had had it at that point. Our DM finally decided it was time to replace the old water heater because it simply couldn’t even handle 2 baths spaced 1 hour apart. As you could imagine all of us were really excited about this news. However, we would have to shut down for 2 days for it to be delivered and installed. So we did, and then we all get a message the day we’re supposed to go in saying that they have not yet delivered the new water heater and we will have to wait until then.
We have no clue when we will get it or how long we’ll be out of work, I imagine not for very long but we are upset because we have to use OUR PTO for the days we are missing. It just doesn’t seem fair because we finally just started building trust with our clients again. An issue that could’ve been avoided had they just taken us seriously has caused significant drop in sales, prebooking, irritated clientele, short paychecks and corporate getting on us about us not doing enough. It’s just irritating.