Whirlpool should be shot for using thermocouples with LEFT-HANDED THREADS on their fucking water heaters.
Assholes.
And don’t give me any BS about how that’s to tell, say, a furnace thermocouple from a water heater thermocouple. THEY’RE ALL THE SAME FUCKING VOLTAGE.
FUCK FUCK FUCK. Now I have to go to the fucking hardware. Where I doubt they will have a LEFT-HAND THREADED THERMOCOUPLE.
UPDATE TO ADD: Apparently I am not alone.
Babicky said there is little difference between the four manufacturers and he said they are all reliable. In fact, many of the parts, including the thermocouple, are universal and can be used in any gas water heater.
An Unusual Design
However, in the case of Whirlpool’s version of AWHC’s water heater, the thermocouple uses left-handed threading, which means it’s not universal — the customer must either get a replacement part by mail or try to find one at Lowe’s.
The reverse thread is unusual. Jeff Adler, also from George Morlan Plumbing, said, “Left-handed threads are generally only used for propane.”
Yep. Or for other explosive gases like acetylene.
Of course the other trick is that this isn’t a pressure fitting; it’s electrical. So there’s even less reason for it to be left-hand threaded.
UPDATE, 12/16: Thanks, Bobbi, for the link.
Oh, come on now. Tell us how you really feel.
This is absolutely maddening.
I have worked in this industry for 40 years, man and boy, and I never heard of such a thing. This is obviously a ploy on the part of Whirlpool to drive sales of their own branded parts, so that I can’t use a generic thermocouple to replace their piece of shit that lasted only about six years.
Jerks.
I managed to rig it so it works. Thank God for duct tape. Now I can order a new thermocouple and still have hot water while waiting for it to arrive.
Normally I’d worry about this kind of repair, since the thermocouple is part of the safety device, but if it slips and breaks contact the only thing that will happen is the gas will shut off…same as if the pilot light were to go out, which is the whole job of the safety device in the first place 🙂
Luckily Sears sells the same water heater (they’ve been selling Whirlpool appliances under the Kenmore name since I was a kid) and they have the part. In the meantime, my white trash engineering repair is working fine.
Geez. When the water heater blows and launches through your roof, I wonder if it will look like the contrail in LA last month.
It can’t blow. It’s like a fusion reactor, set to fail safe.
Now, if I’d wired around the thermocouple, that would be dangerous 🙂
See, a thermocouple is a dielectric generator that puts out a couple of millivolts of electricity when it is heated (e.g., by the pilot light). It is connected to and holds open a normally-closed solenoid valve. If the pilot light goes out, the electricity stops, and the valve snaps shut, cutting off the gas. It does, in fact, fail safely, which is what happened when the thermocouple went bad (and it’s happened a couple of times again since I rigged it, because it keeps coming loose).
But yeah, if I didn’t know what I was doing, I’d be calling a plumber 🙂
I think I’m beginning to understand the left-hand thread thing. Apparently there is a fusible link inline between the thermocouple and the connector, which is set to blow when the temperature in the sealed combustion chamber gets too high (i.e., when the inlet for combustion air gets clogged). The left-hand thread prevents Joe Random Homeowner from replacing it with a standard ‘couple that doesn’t have the fusible link.
The fact that it has that fusible link, and that it was not made clear that the air inlet (which is on the bottom of the water heater, out of sight, out of mind) needed to be cleaned on a regular basis, is what caused so many people to have trouble with this model, and is why Whirlpool had to agree to a class-action settlement to get out of a massive defective product lawsuit. And they apparently modified the heater so that it now has a reset button on the combustion chamber door instead of a one-time fusible link in the thermocouple. (Mine, of course, does not have that feature. So the next time it goes bad, the water heater gets replaced. And not with a Whirlpool or any of the ones made by American Water Heater, either.)
By the way:
Use side cutters to cut old thermocouple
Slide old nut off of thermocouple
Use hacksaw with several thicknesses of blade to cut wide slot in nut
Slide nut over new thermocouple
Voila! Left hand thread on new thermocouple.
(Since this is an electrical connection and not a fluid or gas connection using a split nut is usually OK)
My sympathies. Any mfr who uses proprietary parts should be shot. They could as easily made the fusible link a separate item and made the couple common.
You know, I never thought of that.
I must be getting old 🙂
Just as an update: The replacement I ordered from Sears has been backordered. Something tells me I’m not going to find one at this late date.
So either I’m going to try Og’s split-nut trick or I’m going to replace the heater altogether, given it’s out of warranty anyway.
In the meantime, the duct tape seems to hold OK for two or three days, then it slips and I have to retape it. No big deal.