My bathroom sinks are like this. The sweet spot is nearly impossible to find for washing hands. Poorly designed faucet.
My shower faucets (same vintage) do not have this problem.
I get the same thing, there is maybe a cm of distance in the knob between ‘comfortable’ and too hot or too cold.
I’m not a plumber so I don’t know how to install them, but a digital temperature controller for the shower plus a tankless water heater would be awesome. All the water you want and at the right temp.
I have used a large variety of showers among the houses, apartments, hotels where I have lived or visited. Some plumbing setups have hot/cold water knobs that are extremely touch sensitive with a wide swing in temperature with very minimal adjustment in the happy warm comfy water zone. Some valves are worn or intrinsically crappy. Sometimes a furnace keeps the hot water way to hot. In my experience, this is most often an issue in older buildings with dated plumbing. Most showers I’ve encountered have no problems with gradual temperature adjustment.
The worst for me was a bathroom sink in a rented apartment in a converted Victorian era house. It had two faucets, one for hot water and one for cold water. The hot water felt comfortably warm for 10 seconds after 30 seconds of cold and followed by scorching hot. The shower was not ideal but okay…the hot water had to be not quite completely shut off while the cold water ran full stream.
I have a issue that I can turn on the hot water side fully and just barely turn the cold knob on and the water goes completely cold. Have you ever heard of that?
My solution was to adjust the temperature at the hot water heater–so avoid getting accidentally scalded.
I have a digital fawcett in my bathroom, so I can adjust the temperature with some accuracy. In my experience it’s about 10 to 15 degres celcius between too hot (around 45 C) to too cold (around 35 C). That’s a significant difference, so not a small range.
I think it all has to do with the “valve” on which the faucet sits. We just remodeled our bathrooms. We didn’t scrimp on the shower faucet / valve - paid a little over $1k for it. (Not sure I’m using the right terminology. What I mean: the “faucet” is the visible part of the shower faucet. The “valve” is the plumbing device inside the wall which the shower faucet attaches to and controls.) Our model has a knob that turns the water on and off, and a large handle that adjusts the temperature. I’ve always found this set up to have a nice, smooth transition between temperatures. There has never been a boundary which goes from “way too hot” to “way too cold”.
When most places are built, the builders go for the cheapest faucet / valve combination because – what do they care? Almost no one checks the shower faucet before buying the place. IMHO, anyway.
J.
If it were just a small comfort range, you’d think that there wouldn’t be as many people complaining about it being different with different faucets.
But it’s easy enough to test with a thermometer. In my case, comfortable starts at about 95 degrees, and ends at about 120 (Fahrenheit). That’s a pretty good sized range. One of my wife’s nursing books warns not to set water temps above 120 for the elderly, and 130 for anybody, and my water heater has a warning sticker at about the 140 range for “serious burns even with short contact times.”
ETA: and with that 25 degree range in mind, the smallest perceptible twist of my shower faucet is enough to move it into or out of that range, so in my case, at least, it is the faucet. The temperature changes vary over the faucets range, but in the middle part, the smallest twist I could manage changed the water temperature by 18 degrees. (And the bottom third of the range didn’t change it at all – it was about 43 over that entire range.)
You should let your FarrahBot 3000 enjoy the rest of the house. How realistic is her feathered hair, anyway?
What about a digital shower gauge where you input the temperature you want, do those work?
I can’t spell for shit.
My shower does this bizarre thing where sometimes if I want the water a bit warmer I will turn *down *the cold handle which causes the water to immediately become freezing! After 10 seconds or so it goes back to a normal temperature.
I too am astonished at how bad water taps are at allowing reliable and predictable changes in water temperature. I mean, how hard can it be?
If I can set the temperature of the oven, iron, and central heating; then why can’t I do it on a shower? Why can’t I just say “Make it degrees”, and then it does it?
Whoever invents a shower like that will be a trillionaire…
they are.
http://www.kohler.com/dtvprompt/
Are they any good though? What is other people’s experience?
The shower is rather more complicated than the oven, iron or central heating. The way those things work is to have a 50 cent temperature sensor, and when the temp goes below X, it BRINGS ON THE HOT. Then when the temp goes above Y, it TURNS OFF THE HOT. A shower like that would be flip flopping between icy cold and scalding hot every 10 seconds.
A shower control has to finely tune the hot and cold inputs to maintain a steady pressure at the nozzle and temperature, even if some f-ing idiot flushes the toilet, or starts the washing machine when you’re showering. It can be done, but it’s pricey.