Wonderful Whirlpool

Last night approaching bedtime my wife informs me that there is no hot water. Well, now is a fine time to tell me Lucille. The water heater has a fancy electronic control box with a little blinky light and it's blinking out error code 6, which means the upper sensor is out of commission. A little Googling turns up this page, which suggests that the connector is weak. It's nothing special, just a small plastic connector for four wires. The contacts look like brass and since we are working with very low voltage a little bit of corrosion could be the culprit. I unplug it and replug it a couple of times but it doesn't help. Now I run into the new improved lighting protocol. You can't relight the pilot light until the thermopile has cooled off enough to stop producing electricity. You can ignite the pilot light but it will only stay lit as long as you hold down the button. Holding it longer, like two minutes instead of one, doesn't help. Let off the button and the flame goes out.

Maybe replugging the connector was not enough, so I use a small jewelers screw driver to push on the sides of the brass barrel connectors hoping to distort them enough that they will scrape the contact surface when I plug it in. I can't tell whether I have actually had any effect. I give the controller ten minutes to cool and try lighting it again. This time the pilot stays lit and the LED is blinking a nice steady 'one'. All is well. Turn the knob to on and whoosh, the burner lights off. Wake up this morning with a tank full of hot water. Mmmmm, hot water, my favorite.

This reminds me that 25 years ago we used to have a similar problem with Multibus-I computers. After they had been running for a while (a couple of years maybe?) they would just quit. The solution was to pull all the boards out and polish the edge connectors with a pencil eraser. I remember bringing at least one computer back to life this way. The thing is those edge connectors were gold plated but they still developed enough tarnish to impeded electrical contact. I haven't seen that kind of problem in years. Has connector technology improved? In any case it looks like not everyone has gotten the memo on how to deal with this.