Please, check for me if the underground section of pipe is insulated. Hot and Cold.
Also, do you live in area where it gets very cold ?

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Originally Posted by lolhank

There is not a check valve anywhere that I can tell, that does make sense, where should one be installed? Somewhere to stop water from going back into the bottom of the tank?

Thanks

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You don't want to keep the recirculating water from going into the bottom of the tank you want just the opposite, you want the cold water to not come out of the heater and back into the circulating line.


Milo will you explain why you would put a check on the cold water line at the top of the heater.

Well, today we were able to figure out the problem, we traced all the plumbing and found the one set of lines (hot and cold) went to an old shower that used to be in service in one of the garage bays (the garage used to be a workshop). The plumbing was set up where it was a cold line feed and a hot line went into it at the end, basically you could add some hot water to the cold when you took a shower but not with your traditional type faucet, just some valves sweated into the lines. Anyway, the valve on the hot water was partially open therefore allowing the water to mix hot and cold, for whatever reason, as soon as we shut off the hot valve, hot water was restored to the entire system in the house. I hope this makes sense, it was a really dumb way to have a shower set up but with a lot of patience and help from you guys, we narrowed down the problem.

Thanks for everything!

Indeed, very unusual installation... Glad you were able to solve the problem yourself. Swing by if you need help with your plumbing projects in the future ! Milo