Our Lazy Cat Broke the Universe

One day, my wife and I were starting to notice that the hot water was cooling down, gradually. Every time we fired up the faucet, the time it took to deplete the hot water got shorter and shorter. It was a very gradual decline over a few weeks as I recall.

It wasn’t until we witnessed something suspicious that we knew that the problem was more serious than we had imagined. What’s the worst at this point? A broken water heater? Makes sense. But when you see one of your cats relaxing in a strange location out of the blue…

..Mrs. Fields was lounging in the doorway to the utility room, half way into the hallway. Not normal. At the same moment I noticed that, I also felt that the floor beneath my feet was warm. Really not normal. The only thing that could cause radiating heat from a concrete slab through laminate floor that has no supplemental floor heating system is hot water…or lava. Given the circumstances, I was fairly convinced that there was a leak under the slab. A hot water leak.

I was right.