# 'Twere the Rants Before Christmas (December Mini-Rants) **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Tags:** monthly-mini-rant\ **Created:** [December 1, 2025, 5:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twere-the-rants-before-christmas-december-mini-rants/1025280 "2025-12-01T05:04:15Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 173
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2025, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twere-the-rants-before-christmas-december-mini-rants/1025280/173 "2025-12-13T19:18:10Z")
From the “No good deed goes unpunished” files … I participated in this thread last week: > [@Do I \*need\* a vacuum breaker in my shower hose?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-i-need-a-vacuum-breaker-in-my-shower-hose/1025566): > > I replaced the hand-held shower head and its hose in our bathroom the other day. There was a part between the female end of the shower hose and the male fitting projecting from the wall. I removed it, installed the new shower head, and everything works fine. Today, after a fair amount of internet searching, I discovered that the part I removed is a vacuum breaker. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one as part of a shower like this in any of our previous homes. So, the question really is that simple;… In which I learned that when I added a dual hand shower head to my existing shower, the plumbing code here in FL (and most, not all, other states) requires a “vacuum backflow breaker”, a little gizmo you install between the main shower head and the hand shower hose. Which prevents dirty drain water from getting sucked back up the handshower line in rather unlikely, but still possible, circumstances _if_ the hand shower head is left sitting in drain water _and_ other building plumbing stuff malfunctions at the same time. Being a good citizen and not wanting to risk polluting my neighboring apartments’ water supply, nor get sideways with the building super, I ordered a hand shower backflow preventer from Amazon, taking care to get what seemed to be a good one. Damned things are $25 for a tube of metal and plastic ~5/8" in diameter by 1-1/4" long. OK. Welp, it might well break a vacuum in a plumbing emergency, but it also reduces the pressure and flow to the hand shower to a mere trickle vs. what it was before. Rendering the hand shower useless. Of course, me being an aging and now out of practice DIYer, I damaged my shower head installing the breaker. So I had to replace that too. And the new one is not as capable or as well-styled as the old one, which model has since been discontinued despite me buying it only ~15 months ago. If the old model was still available I’d have simply gotten another identical one. No such luck. So now I have a useless and unreturnable $25 ~~backflow preventer~~ forward flow almost-preventer and a new $100 shower head I don’t like as well as the old one I was perfectly happy with on Monday. One that had years of good use left in it. And I’m _still_ not code compliant and neighborly. Nor will ever I be. Gaah! The only good news is that unlike many of my not so proficient DIY projects these days, no blood was shed. So let that be a lesson to all of us: Good deeds often attract punishment. I’m not sure whether I should take that as a signal to do more or fewer good deeds. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twere-the-rants-before-christmas-december-mini-rants/1025280)._