That's how old my gas hot water system is.
Thirty years. It has outlived two governments, one marriage in my street, and every appliance I've bought since. And every morning, it does exactly what I ask of it: hot water, on demand, no fuss.
Should I replace it? Probably. Everyone tells me so. But here's the thing —
It works.
And that's the most powerful argument in the world against changing anything.
The quiet cost of "it works"
The trouble with "it works" is that it's a very low bar dressed up as a high one.
My system works, sure. It also:
- burns more gas than it needs to
- takes its sweet time getting hot
- rumbles like a small aircraft at 6am
- costs me money every single month that I'll never see again
None of that shows up as a failure. There's no alarm, no error code, no leak on the garage floor. Just a slow, invisible tax on my time, my money, and my patience - paid quietly, for thirty-one years.
That's the sneaky part. Nothing is broken. It's just not as good as it could be, and nobody ever sends you an invoice for the difference.
We do this everywhere
I don't think this is really about hot water systems.
It's the spreadsheet that's been copied forward since 2019. The folder structure only one person understands. The process that works because someone remembers to check it on a Friday. The tool everyone quietly complains about and nobody replaces.
We fear change more than we fear inefficiency - because inefficiency is familiar, and change is not. "If it works, why fix it?" isn't laziness. It's a completely reasonable instinct that happens to be expensive.
But it could always be better
That's the bit I keep coming back to. Not broken versus working - but working versus better.
Cheaper. Quieter. Faster. Less of your day spent on the thing, more spent on the thing that actually matters.
That's what we're chasing at ReqTwin. We build requirements management for construction teams — tracing every requirement from spec to sign-off, so the evidence is there when someone asks for it, instead of scattered across PDFs, inboxes and someone's memory.
You probably have a way of doing this already. It probably works. That's exactly the point.
Give it 30 days
You don't have to rip anything out. You don't have to commit to anything. Just try it, the way you'd try a hotter shower that costs less to run.
Start your free 30-day trial - and see whether "it works" was ever really the ceiling.
My hot water system is still going, by the way. I'll get to it. Probably.