Found a note taped to a 1970s water heater in my grandparents' crawlspace

The note said 'Don't let Jerry touch this thing' with a date stamp from June 1983. No one in my family knows who Jerry is or what he did, but I counted 14 handwritten warnings about him on different appliances. Is this a funny family mystery or did Jerry actually wreck something bad?

2 comments

2 Comments

emery96528d ago

Oh come on, 14 handwritten warnings on old appliances is more of a running gag than a real threat. Someone probably just labeled stuff after Jerry left a burner on once or unplugged the fridge by accident. Water heaters from the 70s are tanks, they don't blow up from someone jiggling a knob. If Jerry really did something bad you'd see scorch marks or a hole in the floor, not a stack of taped notes. Your family probably kept the tradition going as a joke about some clumsy relative.

paul_morgan28d ago

I actually read an article from a retired fire investigator a few years back who said the most dangerous thing in an old house isn't the appliances themselves but the wiring and the ground connections. He told a story about a water heater from the 60s that had the grounding wire chewed through by mice, and someone jiggling the knob created a small spark inside the gas valve. The thing didn't blow up, but it did singe the wall pretty good and filled the basement with smoke. So while a gag is possible, that many warnings on one thing suggests somebody either saw something or got scared enough to keep adding to the pile.