BOURBONNAIS — A broken water heater at Liberty Intermediate School is being replaced after the purchase was approved during Tuesday’s meeting of the Bourbonnais Elementary School Board.

Board member Stephan Moulton asked the item on the consent agenda be removed and discussed and voted on separately.

“How did we get to a point where our newest building [with the] newest equipment has a failure?” Moulton asked.

Liberty was built in 2005.

“When we got the report of the failure, we asked those same questions,” Superintendent Adam Ehrman said.

Ehrman said the problem appears to have resulted from user error.

One of the two water heaters was empty, drained and not being utilized, causing it to rust out and fail over time. Meanwhile, the other heater was running at double capacity and essentially burnt out, he said.

“So what we’re doing is obviously, we have to fix it as quick as possible,” he said.

Quotes for new systems came in just in time for the board meeting, Ehrman said.

The board OK’d the cheapest option of three bids, a tankless water heater from Precision Piping Inc., of Kankakee, for a total of about $20,000.

Dennis Crawford, chief school business official, noted that Liberty was not completely out of hot water; since the fourth-grade addition is newer, it has a standalone system that still works.

“[The new system] would alternate so that we’re never putting anything on one or the other,” Crawford noted. “They will rotate in life, and then if one goes down, you can still work off the other while getting one fixed.”

Ehrman said the new equipment would be installed as soon as possible.

“But the good news is if we do that, it should last at least beyond 10 to 13 years, which means I won’t have to answer this question again,” Ehrman said. “The summary in this is that a decision was made, probably with good intentions, but it did not work out well to try to drain one and leave one for reserves.”