20 Apr 07: Hot water travels slow in our house
Recently I've been troubled by the slowness of the hot water as it travels through the house to the downstairs shower.
It's not as if we live in a mansion, although what exactly you'd call a mansion is completely subjective. If you're home is a mud hut in an African village, I live in a mansion. If you happen to live in a mansion, our home is a modest Victorian terrace in a humble street.
But it's not just an ordinary Victorian terrace - not a worker's cottage. No, nothing as - well, workery - as that. Oh no, ours would be the sort of terrace that I like to imagine a postman or a government clerk might have lived in, someone with a solid, respectable job.
I'm not talking about one of those four- or five-storey dwellings you see in London, also sometimes called a terrace, but one whose fifth storey would have been the staff living quarters, with less grand windows to boot. No, ours is just a humble terrace the sort a respectable clerk working for the government might have lived in with his equally-respectable two-parent family.
Anyway, by an unusual chain of events we ended up with our shower room on the ground floor, whereas the central heating boiler is on the first floor. I won't go into the details, suffice it to say that once I'd finished paying for the shower room to be rebuilt, there was nothing left for the upstairs bathroom, where perhaps a shower might have been more appropriate.
So, every morning, everyone who happens to be staying at our house that particular morning has to go downstairs to take their morning shower, and I am usually the first one down there. This is either because I am more industrious than they are, or simply smugger, I'll leave that for you to decide.
This unusual location of the shower, incidentally, is good news for the dog, who gets to say hello to everyone on their way down.
When I get to the shower and turn it on, it takes an awfully long time for the water to get hot, and that's my point. An awfully long time, I'm talking minutes. And that bothers me, because an awful lot of water goes straight down the plug-hole in those minutes. In those minutes I'm thinking to myself, "I'm sure this didn't take so long in the winter, when the heating was on", and that's probably true.
But having got myself into this situation, what on earth can one do when the boiler is so far from the shower? Changing the shower isn't really an option, the last time a workman with an adjustable spanner went near it I ended up £1100 worse off. That was seven years ago, and I haven't recovered yet.
Should I have done something more eco-friendly when the shower was installed, like adding a solar panel to the roof? Maybe I should do that now. The irony is, we were warned off an electric power shower, which would have solved the problem, on the grounds that it used up too much electricity.
Maybe we should all stop taking showers? Just a thought.
It's not as if we live in a mansion, although what exactly you'd call a mansion is completely subjective. If you're home is a mud hut in an African village, I live in a mansion. If you happen to live in a mansion, our home is a modest Victorian terrace in a humble street.
But it's not just an ordinary Victorian terrace - not a worker's cottage. No, nothing as - well, workery - as that. Oh no, ours would be the sort of terrace that I like to imagine a postman or a government clerk might have lived in, someone with a solid, respectable job.
I'm not talking about one of those four- or five-storey dwellings you see in London, also sometimes called a terrace, but one whose fifth storey would have been the staff living quarters, with less grand windows to boot. No, ours is just a humble terrace the sort a respectable clerk working for the government might have lived in with his equally-respectable two-parent family.
Anyway, by an unusual chain of events we ended up with our shower room on the ground floor, whereas the central heating boiler is on the first floor. I won't go into the details, suffice it to say that once I'd finished paying for the shower room to be rebuilt, there was nothing left for the upstairs bathroom, where perhaps a shower might have been more appropriate.
So, every morning, everyone who happens to be staying at our house that particular morning has to go downstairs to take their morning shower, and I am usually the first one down there. This is either because I am more industrious than they are, or simply smugger, I'll leave that for you to decide.
This unusual location of the shower, incidentally, is good news for the dog, who gets to say hello to everyone on their way down.
When I get to the shower and turn it on, it takes an awfully long time for the water to get hot, and that's my point. An awfully long time, I'm talking minutes. And that bothers me, because an awful lot of water goes straight down the plug-hole in those minutes. In those minutes I'm thinking to myself, "I'm sure this didn't take so long in the winter, when the heating was on", and that's probably true.
But having got myself into this situation, what on earth can one do when the boiler is so far from the shower? Changing the shower isn't really an option, the last time a workman with an adjustable spanner went near it I ended up £1100 worse off. That was seven years ago, and I haven't recovered yet.
Should I have done something more eco-friendly when the shower was installed, like adding a solar panel to the roof? Maybe I should do that now. The irony is, we were warned off an electric power shower, which would have solved the problem, on the grounds that it used up too much electricity.
Maybe we should all stop taking showers? Just a thought.
Labels: hot water
posted by Unknown at 5:39 pm
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