UPDATE: When is the right time to replace a water heater?

ABOUT THREE MONTHS AGO, in a post HERE (2/14/22), I discussed the principle that special measures ($$) are warranted whenever there’s a premium placed on the reliability of services. I used the example of the water heater that supplies hot water to our school/office building — which houses our burgeoning preschool. 

It now appears that I had picked a very good illustration for this principle of facilities management. This week, I received a strongly worded email from each of the two main figures behind our preschool. The present post takes note of their express desire — namely, that our synagogue do whatever it takes to avoid disruptions of the preschool’s scheduled days of operation.

Tatiana Zaidman’s message

On the topic of when to schedule certain planned maintenance projects, our Director of Early Childhood Education wrote (5/9/22):

Closing the school is something that I am trying to avoid at all costs due to the pushback from families who rely on us for childcare.… Without…evidence of the immediate threat to the building’s structural security, I cannot approve closing the preschool for…an upgrade at this time. 

Melissa Tarsky’s message

Our board liaison with the preschool followed up with more detail (5/9/22):

What I think you should be asking is the following:

 

• What is the probability of something happening that forces the school to close? (For reference, in the 17 years that I’ve been involved, the only thing that closed the school as an emergency was Covid.)
• What would the additional cost be to do necessary maintenance in the late-afternoon, evening, or Sunday so that we don’t have to close the school?
• When is the school closed during the week so that necessary maintenance can be done then? 

 

The cost of the closing the school for the day is much greater than just the financial cost. Conducting planned maintenance that necessitates closing the school would be a severe breach of trust with the parents. We’d likely lose families. We’d also cost them much more than a single day’s tuition because baby sitters (if one could find one for a single day) are more expensive than group care.

 

In other words, closing the school at all is to be avoided at all costs.

Discussion

I quote Tatiana’s and Melissa’s words because together they have eloquently raised an important point. Namely, the parents who have entrusted their children to our preschool highly value its being able to reliably watch over them during the contracted period of each day that the school schedule has announced that it’s open.

What applies to planned maintenance applies also to unplanned maintenance and repair, right? Arguably even more so, because shorter advance notice is involved when a facilities’ component suddenly breaks or starts to fail. And that’s more disruptive of everyone’s plans.

Which is why it seems to make sense to proactively replace the building’s water heater — whose age is well past its design lifetime. Otherwise, the risk is pretty high that the preschool may unexpectedly need to close for a day or two, if and when the unit leaks or otherwise fails.

What would be the $$ cost to Mishkon of our taking such an action to increase the reliability of our preschool’s hot-water system? As I noted in my previous post, the net expenditure amounts about $70 per year over the expected lifetime of the new unit. That’s roughly $1.50 per week that the preschool is open for business.

UPDATE 5/26/22:  Finally was able to get a quote for a 30-gal tank, which is hard to find but is actually the size that we need. (Current tank is 50 gal.) It’s the same cost as the 40-gal tank that I was basing my calculations on previously. This means that if the new water heater lasted for 12 years, it would pay for itself in the energy saved over that period of time. If it lasted for only the design lifetime of 10 years, the net installed cost would be about $280, or less than 60¢/week.

Would the added reliability be worth that cost? What do you think?