This might be our second-least-favorite installation. These water heaters are located in a closet on the ends of each block of buildings. That's not especially unusual. What is, is that they're mounted on a second-story platform, about eight feet above ground, with only about four feet between the door and the start of the water heater platform. Tight.

Take a good look at the photos at right. It's only an accident of the browser that the top and bottom ones run together, but by doing so, they pretty closely show reality. That's because while the water heater is upstairs, a slew of meters and phone wiring are downstairs and one of the problems here was that every time the water heater broke, it leaked all over this stuff.

As you can see, there was a sort of shaky ladder built into the wall, but getting up, doing anything at all and getting down without falling down is a bit tricky.

We had seen these during an inspection in the mid-1990s. When we returned some years later to take pictures, we learned that management was moving the water heaters down to the ground.

Our question: why didn't the architect do that at the outset?