About the Author

 

 

 

 

 

A trade older than the appliance

 

The family’s connection to plumbing does not start with the modern storage tank. It starts in the mid-1800s, when American towns were still fighting over indoor water and waste.

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In 1856, Bavarian immigrant Franz Johann Fehn settled in the German community of College Point, Queens, and opened the shop that became WM. F. Fehn & Son. College Point was turning from farmland into a factory village around Conrad Poppenhusen’s rubber works. Streets were being paved. Gas and water were being run to individual houses. A plumber arriving that year was not finishing already-built homes. He was piping a town that had just been invented.

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No patent under Fehn’s name has turned up yet. His generation’s work was the unglamorous backbone that made dense living possible: lead service lines off new village mains, kitchen range boilers heated by a stove water-back, waste lines to cesspools, gas pipe from the same shop, and factory piping in the mill. The dedicated storage water heater did not exist yet. Maughan’s Geyser is 1868. Ruud’s automatic tank is 1889–1890. The Fehn shop was already there when those machines arrived.

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The business passed to Franz’s sons, among them William Frances Fehn, and then to his grandson Sidney Melbourne Fehn. In 1925, Sidney formalized the company and steered it toward the new household equipment of the age: water heaters, steam boilers, and the systems that joined them. By mid-century the firm still worked from the original College Point address at 212 Thirteenth Street — later folded into today’s 13th Avenue after Queens was renumbered — and from a branch in St. James, Long Island.

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West, and into the desert

 

In 1961 the family closed the New York operations and moved the trade to Scottsdale, Arizona. New climate, different water, different codes — same work.

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Sid Baysinger grew up inside that shop. Born in 1959, he was on the job in his father’s commercial plumbing business by age twelve, summers as a plumber’s helper. He learned the trade the old way: carry the fittings, watch the journeyman. He became a journeyman. In 1979, at twenty, he passed the Arizona Plumbing Contractors License Exam and opened his own business in Scottsdale.

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From the start, the water heater held his attention. It is the appliance that fails in the night, stains the ceiling, and sits at the intersection of fuel, water chemistry, venting, code, and household habit. Over the next decades he worked hundreds of residential and commercial heaters — tank-type, tankless, boiler-fed, and later heat-pump — first as a general plumber, then as a water-heater specialist.

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Building the operating companies

 

The map of his working life is the map of two western cities.

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• 1979 — Independent plumbing practice in Scottsdale

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• 1989 — Move to Sacramento and the founding of Capital Plumbing Company

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• 2000 — Water Heaters 4 Less, a water-heater division of Capital Plumbing

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• 2012 — The work was reorganized under Water Heater Pros

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• 2019 — Baysinger, LLC, for business, marketing, research, and restoration

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• 2021 — Tankless Pros Az, LLC, with operations in Phoenix and continuing in Sacramento

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• 2027 — Purely Water Solutions, specializing in water-filtration sales and installation

 

The companies became authorized dealers and installers for the names that dominate the American tank and tankless market — Bradford White, Ruud/Rheem, Navien, Rinnai, Noritz, and American Standard among them. Sid studied plumbing code and mechanical work and sat through plenty of code classes. The field, not the classroom, stayed the main school.

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What the companies taught him — and what this site tries to keep honest — is that a water heater is never only a product. It is a date code, a lining process, a failed anode, a city water report, a venting rule written after a fire, and a brand that may have been bought three times since the label was printed.

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Baysinger, LLC — the research and marketing company

 

In 2019, Sid founded Baysinger, LLC, a marketing and consulting company built for the same trades he has practiced since childhood.

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Baysinger, LLC is the office behind the archive and the shop. It provides marketing to plumbing, water-heater, and water-filtration companies. It designs and builds websites for the trade. It studies and restores antique water heaters — the copper tanks, early automatic storage units, and orphaned nameplates that never made it into a museum. And it does original research in water heating and water filtration: patents, manufacturer records, serial systems, lining chemistry, hardness and conductivity, and the long argument over what water actually does to a tank.

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Waterheaterhistory.com sits in that house. So does the restoration bench. The consulting work is not separate from the history. A contractor who cannot date a heater cannot sell one honestly. A marketer who does not know Ruud from Maughan will repeat the same errors the open web already repeats. Baysinger, LLC exists so the trade can speak with a clean record.

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Purely Water Solutions — January 2027

 

In January 2027, Sid is launching Purely Water Solutions, an Arizona company built around one idea the family has been circling for 170 years: hot water and clean water belong in the same package.

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Purely Water Solutions will specialize in whole-house water heating and filtration — tank, tankless, and heat-pump heaters specified with the treatment the local water actually requires. Arizona water is hard, mineral-heavy, and hard on glass-lined steel. Filtration and softening are not extras in that climate. They are part of the heater’s service life. The new company treats them as one installation: source water in, conditioned water through the house, hot water at the tap.

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The name is new. The problem is not. Franz Fehn’s generation piped raw village water into range boilers. Sid’s generation learned what that water does to anodes, dip tubes, and tanks. Purely Water Solutions is the next sentence in that line.

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The next generation, and a quieter bench

 

Sid has begun handing the operating companies to the family.

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In Phoenix, his daughter Victoria Baysinger manages the shop, working with Matthew, Andrew, and Adam. In Sacramento, the family side of the house includes Steve and Christina, with crews the family treats as kin. The trade is now in its fifth generation from Franz Fehn’s 1856 shop — sixth, if the youngest working names are counted. The Baysinger name is on the Arizona and California licenses and on the Montana consulting firm.

 

The Fehn shop is the root.

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That is the living line. This website is the written one.

 

Sid is stepping off the truck. After nearly five decades of licensed contracting, he is moving out of the day-to-day businesses and toward retirement. The shops continue under the family. His own time now belongs to Baysinger, LLC — the research, the restoration work, and the pages of waterheaterhistory.com — and to a quieter house with his wife Leslie, their two dachshunds, and the easy life they earned the long way.

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Purely Water Solutions is designed to run without Sid on every job. The archive remains his.

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Why this site matters

 

Waterheaterhistory.com is not a contractor brochure. It is an attempt to give the appliance a proper past.

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Sid’s working life ran parallel to the late history of the tank: glass lining as the mass-market standard, the sacrificial anode as ordinary maintenance, the rise of condensing and tankless equipment, the return of heat-pump water heating, and the long afterlife of brands that survive only as private labels. He has opened heaters whose nameplates still carried companies that no longer exist. He has watched folklore harden into “fact” on the open web — soft water “killing” tanks, serial numbers decoded by guesswork, inventors credited with machines they never built.

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The site answers that the way a plumber answers a leak: find the source. Patents. Journals from the period.

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Manufacturer records. Museum pieces. Restored antiques on the bench. The master timeline, brand histories, inventor biographies, and technical glossary on these pages are written to that standard. Uncertainties are left visible. Dates that cannot be nailed down are not nailed down.

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The family story is not offered as proof of the technical claims. It is offered as the reason the claims were worth making. A household that has cut pipe since 1856 has a stake in remembering how hot water actually arrived in the American house — not the brochure version, the shop version.