I almost Saved Hundreds of Dollars by Using AI Instead of Calling a Plumber

I recently lost hot water in my house, and I wanted it fixed ASAP. With the massive improvements in AI capabilities, I figured I could at least try to ask a Large Language Model (LLM) how to fix it. I’m using AI a lot for work and personal tasks now, and so I feel pretty good about my ability to ask the right questions and create a powerful prompt; I’ve even taken a prompting course!

First, I told the AI what we were about to do together: I was going to give it a bunch of information about my home’s tankless water heater, explain the problem we were having, and then the LLM was going to help me DIY fix it by clearly explaining the steps to me. I am not a plumber but am somewhat handy, so the LLM should be pretty clear when describing what I need to do.

After I told it what we were going to do, it let me know that it understood the assignment and was ready. So, I got started. First, I’d take a picture of the tankless water heater so that it would know what brand and model we were dealing with. It worked like a charm. Next, I explained the issue: we didn’t have hot water.

Pro-Move: I also gave it some potentially valuable context in that Houston was in the middle of a major freeze, where temperatures had been in the mid-20’s for a few days. Our infrastructure isn’t built for that and I figured that could be playing a role. I was lauded for pointing that out and told it likely has a lot to do with the problem.

The Troubleshooting Rabbit Hole

That was it! The LLM got to work. It researched the make and model of the tankless water heater and found the information it needed to help me troubleshoot it. First, go to the Settings. Scroll through to report back to the LLM various datapoints, some of which I thought I knew what they meant. For example, Flow Rate; this is telling us the rate of water flow. I know that insufficient water flow can prevent the hot water from working, so this metric seemed important. I didn’t know what rate was necessary to have hot water, but that’s what the LLM is for. It knows.

There were other metrics I wasn’t so sure about: In Temp vs. Out Temp (water temperatures inside the house versus in the pipes underground outside the house?); Firing Rate (how efficiently the flame is working to heat the water; do Tankless heaters even have internal flames?). Anyway, I reported back the metrics it asked for and it quickly narrowed down to a few potential causes of my problem. We would troubleshoot them one-by-one.

It also explained to me in plain language what was likely going on: It seemed that the hot water was somehow backing up into the cold water and telling the system that the water was warmer than it actually was. Therefore, the system wasn’t working very hard to heat the water further, resulting in cold water. The freeze had either caused something to get loose in the pipes that was messing up a valve that should keep those water streams separate, or there was a dirty filter that wasn’t doing its job properly. We were making progress!

The "Almost" Victory

First, try a different Recirculation (“Recirc” in the Settings) setting. It was set to “external” so try “internal”. After you do that, test the hot water. So, I changed the setting, came down the attic stairs, and turned on a hot water faucet. I waited for a bit but there was no hot water. Back up into the attic. Okay, try just turning off Recirculation all together. This won’t mess anything up, don’t worry about it. Cool. I did that, went downstairs, and waited to see if hot water would show up. No dice.

Okay, next step, jiggle the valves. At this point, just leave the water running downstairs and holler down to my wife (a BigLaw attorney who was very much working at the time) to go test the water periodically. First, close and then reopen the red valve handle on this one hose. It might fix a stuck valve. Anything? No. Okay, close and then reopen the blue valve handle on this other water line going into the heater. Anything? No. Let’s move on.

Next step, let’s clean the filter. Maybe some debris got in there and is messing things up. Go downstairs and grab some tools, but this is not complex. Turn off the valve on this one line to stop the water, and then use your wrench to disconnect the line from the water heater. No problem, took 5 minutes, no water leak debacle. Reach into the heater and grab the filter to pull it out.

Hmm, no filter. There’s nothing there.

Me: “Hey, ChatGPT, there’s nothing there.”

ChatGPT: “Ah, okay. That happens on some of these models. If it’s not there then it’s in the other line. The braided one to the left. Put this line back, turn the valve back on, and let’s go look at the other line.”

Cool, no worries, this first line wasn’t a problem so it’s no sweat to do it again on the other line. There was a small issue with the other line, in that the bolt was huge and required me to go back downstairs and find my plumber’s wrench that I knew I had somewhere, but wasn’t totally sure where. Found it in a few minutes and went back up. I was feeling pretty masculine at this point and just generally cool. I could survive the apocalypse.

Anyway, I got that line off and once again, no filter. This time, ChatGPT told me that these models are supposed to have a filter there, but some of them don’t. Seems kind of odd when you think about manufacturing quality control, but whatever. Put the line back and reopen the valve on the line.

It is at this point that ChatGPT told me this is no longer a DIY fix but that I need to call a plumber.

The Crossroads of Ego and Efficiency

Well, I had tried. I felt good that I had at least done my best and used my resources to try to get it sorted out on my own, and surely more quickly than it would take to book a plumber to come fix it. On top of that, I had done a decent amount of troubleshooting so far, and ChatGPT actually told me exactly what to tell the plumber, in their own plumber language, so that they would know what the problem is, what we had done, and where they should start.

This is when it started to dawn on me: this little excursion can be turned into content for me and my business. You are reading it now. This is an allegory for DIY financial planning and the folks who can’t stand the idea of paying money to get advice about how to best optimize their money.

Often, I hear various versions of the same set of questions when somebody is deciding whether they need an advisor:

Are you smart enough to do a lot of it, if not all of it, on your own? Yes, you are.
Do you have a decent background in finance? Haven’t you read some books and watched some shows? Yes, you have.
Aren’t you smart about your money? Don’t you avoid frivolous spending? Yes, you are and yes, you do.
Doesn’t it seem stupid the fees these people charge? Like, it cannot possibly cost that much to push some buttons. Preach.
Aren’t you man/woman/other enough to handle your finances yourself, thank you very much? Hell yeah.

Those sentiments are not far off from how I felt about calling a plumber. My situation is not complex. We have a water heater, and it wasn’t heating the water. We didn’t have a clogged pipe underground or a stream of water spraying 20 feet into the air. Our situation is simple. We don’t need all that stuff that people hire plumbers for. Everybody’s financial situation is simple, too, if you ask them.

The True Cost of the "DIY" Win

Well, I was at a crossroads. ChatGPT is telling me this is no longer DIY, and I had to believe it since it had already gotten me further than I would’ve got myself. And like I said, it was dawning on me: All of my sentiments about the situation were true, but it was also true that I had just wasted my time and some of my wife’s time. I had tinkered with a bunch of stuff in a way that could’ve gone bad if the LLM was hallucinating or just wrong. I wasn’t completely sure I hadn’t messed it up. It had me turn off the recirculation; was that really okay? And the fixing of the problem was now a day delayed because I wasn’t going to get a plumber out there that evening. Oh, and I had wasted a lot of water by running the faucets the whole time.

Here is my point: My time is more valuable than that. Not just at work, but my personal life too. Yes, I want to be handy and I want to teach my kids how to do things on their own. But nonetheless, this was kind of a dumb tradeoff. If I had fixed it, I would’ve saved a few hundred dollars on a plumber. That’s legitimately good! However, there would have been some exchange of value for those few hundred dollars. Maybe I can’t pin down exactly what that would be (My professional hourly rate? The value I put on my time?), but I know there was an exchange.

Given my profession, my wife’s profession, and our family life (3 kids under age 6, 2 dogs, and zero, nay, negative free time), I’d venture to say that the exchange I would make to save that money would not be worth it to me. Obviously, the few hundred bucks for a plumber is different than the thousands you’ll spend on a qualified financial planner, but in both cases you are expecting to get back more than you put in as a result of your delegating the work to the professional. In both cases, the “cost” is actually an investment in which you expect a real-life return of value.

Why 2026 is No Time for "Tinkering"

In the world of finance, the "Houston Freeze" is happening right now. We are facing ongoing changes across tax policy and student loan policy to name a couple, not to mention the geopolitical landscape and potentially existential changes to our society and lives as a result of AI proliferation (Yes, AI is coming for my job).

And what did I get for my efforts? When the plumber finally came, did they cut me a deal since I could tell them exactly what ChatGPT told me to tell them? No. Did they cut me a deal because I had already done some troubleshooting? No. Think about it: Do you ever cut deals for your clients because they have already been researching the law and have “done some of your work for you”? I doubt it.

All this to say that everybody places a different value on their time, on their ego, and on doing things they enjoy (or avoiding things they don’t). There is a significant part of the population who is smart enough to do their “financial planning” on their own, but is simply not going to do it for one reason or another: their time is worth more spent on other things (like lawyering), they have no interest in it, and/or they have no loss of pride in delegating things to a subject-matter expert.

I am convinced that there are more people that fall into this category than realize it until much later in life. This allegory is me trying to gently bring it to your conscious: I do it, we all do it. We all get so used to doing our job and living our life that we forget how valuable our time is and how much better it is to spend any free time we have doing something we enjoy.

This is your reminder. Hiring a competent, experienced professional to deal with stuff you don’t want to deal with is the wise financial move; you’re not paying for a product (e.g., a “financial plan”) and just adding that fee to the tally of dollars leaving your orbit into the void. You are making an investment that will pay off in more actual wealth because you are optimizing for your highest marginal return. I’m not the plumber, your client isn’t the lawyer, and you’re not the financial planner. That’s okay!

I am here to assure you that your professional time is worth more than most other people’s, and your personal time is more valuable than that. Let us handle this for you.

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