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Poll #19365 Taps, or British Things That Still Bother Me After More Than a Decade
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 76
When I am at a basin/sink, I prefer for there to be
If there are two taps, I expect the hot tap to be on the side I reach with my
Separate taps???
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I do not like mixer taps. They are a horrible newfangled concept that makes life needlessly complicated. My house has two of the bloody things and I can't remember which way is hot and which way is cold and one is set sideways on so it isn't even as if they are the same because one is left-right and the other is backwards-forwards!
I can never remember which way the shower turns either and usually get more water when I am trying to turn it off. It is probably just me.
Have you been listening to last night's John Finnemore?
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I grew up with the idea that hot water tanks were nasty things and you didn't want the cold, drinking water to come from the same tap as the hot non-drinking water, but I don't know how true this is or ever was.
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It is all the fault of British plumbing I think.
There is also the thing where the hot water tank will run out, so if you want a bath, you run the hot first to get as much hot water as you are going to get, and then dilute it with sufficient cold to make it bearable to get in, because there won't be any more hot for a while. I still mentally assume hot water is rationed and run my baths like that even though for the first time ever (in my 40s), I live in a house with an instant water-heating boiler.
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As children we weren't allowed to drink the cold water in the bathroom (upstairs) because that had been sitting in the cold water tank in the loft, and when the tank leaked and was removed and I saw the inside I very much saw the point of that. The cold water tap in the kitchen came straight off the mains so was deemed fine (then it turned out to come untreated from a borehole, which we only found out when the council got a wrong number and thought we were the dairy and rang up to say the cattle mustn't be allowed to drink the water any more, so my mother said what about us. Bottled water only for quite a long time until it all got sorted out).
Not really doing anything for stereotypes of British plumbing here...
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I confess to finding concerns about the cleanliness of drinking water (outside of my professional life which is very concerned with it) mildly hilarious because all my family living outside England pulled water from dubious wells until at least 2000.
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I grew up with mixer taps in apartments and houses that were mostly less than 20 years old. The idea that in Earlier Times, taps were separated never even occurred to me.
A lot of shower designs seem specifically calculated to get you to unintentionally flood yourself with cold water.
Funnily enough, I listened to it last night just before I fell asleep. I only got about five minutes in before I conked out, so until I re-listened just now, I didn't know there was a sketch about taps. Or at least, not consciously!
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Yup, that's one of my pet peeves! =:o}
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Besides, is it so very hard to work separate taps? It's all going the same place.
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*Occasionally*, if the weather's really cold and I don't have time (or the energy!) a full shower, I'll boil a kettle full of water and add it to two kettles of cold in a bowl, and treat myself to a nice warm foot-soak. Basically, the hot taps are superfluous. =:o}
My main tip for reducing the discomfort of cold-water washing is to do it in short bursts.
1. Plunge hands through stream to thoroughly wet them, then immediately:
2. soap and rub them thoroughly while *not* under the tap (paying good attention to the gaps between fingers),
3. quickly rinse them under the tap,
4. rub them thoroughly again,
5. quick final rinse, and dry with a towel.
Done! =:o}
It's the combination of soap and rubbing that dislodges the dirt (and dead skin), and then you just need shorts bursts of running water to flush it away.
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It is also helpful when washing dishes, where you want to use hot (but not scalding) water because your hands have to be in/near it, and then want to use scalding hot water when your hands aren't near it, and then cold water to rinse.
Also, there is a lot to be said for thermostatic valves, which automatically adjust for fluctuating water pressure and keep the temperature in e.g. your shower constant when someone flushes the toilet, starts the washing machine, handwashes some dishes, etc. I like them so much, I have them in most of my taps in the house now.
And also hurrah for tankless water heaters (gas powered here in North America, and in Asia, where I first started using them regularly). The ones I have even have remote controls so you can adjust the water temp before you draw a bath, start the washing machine, and so on. Simply outstanding.
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I do not like having separate taps in the sink where I wash my hands, because that means choosing between frozen paws or burnt skin.
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The thing is, washing under the tap only wastes water if you do it for too long. I've always found that with the mix-it-in-a-bowl technique, if you run both taps for long enough to get enough water to submerge your hands properly, then it takes more than half as long as I usually spend running *one* tap for direct washing.
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When we were camping, hand washing was a two person activity, with the second person pouring the tiniest dribble of water out of a bottle to rinse the second persons hands.
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But, I don't really care that much. It has genuinely never bothered me to have to switch hands between taps or run a bit of a bowl of water. And this is entirely because I grew up in houses where the taps were separate. My maternal grandmother didn't even have running hot water upstairs. You washed your hands in cold water (with coal tar soap!) and there was hot running water downstairs.
I think of the hot water as being the left hand tap (as I'm facing them) and that is how my mixer taps are - you slide the top bit to the left for hot, and to the right for cold.
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Oh no! That is rubbish! I had that in a house at university and it was very perilous.
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I prefer a mixer tap so you can set the temperature to what you want, with a minimum of contact with bathroom fixtures. (In micro, we had to swab bathrooms and see what grew. I am still scarred.)
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(Additionally, fancy pants no-touch taps which just turn on when you stick your hands under. Except you can't control how much water comes out when they're turned on. We've got them at work. Service staff is always going, "please don't splash about so much when washing hands, it's such a mess to clean up," and we're always going, "how do I not splash in this tsunami, look at my clothes!" I'm sure they're very hygenic, but...)
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So for high risk things there has to be a full flow overflow that can spill without reaching the level of the inlet pipe (a toilet cistern has one of those). Less risky connections can have double non-return valves instead so I suspect they have those in modern plumbing systems which allows you to use mixer taps.
I definitely prefer mixer taps (clearly labelled!) and I don’t know why people stick with separate taps now we can have them but there used to be a practical reason for them.
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Plenty of places growing up still only had cold water taps (and I vividly remember the pre-school playgroup I went to still had outside toilets - nothing is as 'refreshing' as sitting down on an outside toilet in winter *shivers*)
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(Like, the explanation of hot water tanks in the above threads didn't really quite explain the problem for me until I saw the later comments, because... I grew up with terrible, inefficient hot water tanks in the semi-rural South? And we had separate knobs with a single spout, so I hadn't realised anyone would consider it a health issue!)