I clean my teeth in the shower for the sake of expedience so use warm water. Does it help to clean teeth with warm water and if so why does everyone seem to use cold? We use warm water to clean most other things so why not teeth?
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Moving thread from ATMB to IMHO.
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FWIW, I brush my teeth with warm water. I also have a boiler furnace so my hot water isn’t sitting around soaking up crud from a water heater’s tank (which probably isn’t a big deal these days, but people still warn about it). My hot water was cold water a couple of second ago.
I used cold water when I had a conventional water heater.
Another nice thing about a boiler furnace is that I never ever run out of hot water.
I use warm water because the cold that comes out of the faucet here in New England is fucking freezing. Especially in the winter, though summer is no walk in the park either.
I also use warm water, and often brush in the shower when at home. Whether warm water helps with bacteria, I’m not sure. The other day I brushed in the shower and turned the shower head to the stronger and faster setting. It felt so good! Like a super powerful WaterPik.
Q: Can you tell us how you get your mouth around the shower head?
(Pictures or it didn’t happen…)
I prefer warm water for the same reason. The cold water is cold enough to make me feel like my teeth will crack like ice, especially in the winter. Totally unpleasant.
I like to brush my teeth in the shower. I brush longer in the shower than I do at the sink, so my mouth feels cleaner afterward.
I assume by ‘boiler furnace’ you mean a centralized, on-demand water heater. If so, I think that warm water flowing through the pipes can pick up and dissolve more metals and/or petrochemicals from the pipes than cold water would, but not to the degree that I would worry about it if I found the cold water unpleasantly cold. That said, I wouldn’t use the warm water for drinking, even with an on-demand heater.
I can’t imagine it makes a difference either way as far as warm or cold water in the mouth. After all, the mouth is warm all the time, anyway.
I guess it’s another thread as to wasting water to brush teeth in the shower. I do it at the sink because I’m not running the water while brushing for the designated 2 minutes. I’m not coordinated enough to lather up and brush at the same time.
Huh?
Do you guys brush your teeth or irrigate them?
I splash a little water on my toothbrush (electric these days, but the same with a regular one) to soften it a bit, then add a little toothpaste (most people use way too much), brush for 2 - 2.5 minutes, spit out the toothpaste, use interdental brushes etc, rinse my mouth with lukewarm water twice.
I do rinse the brushes with hot water to get the remaining toothpaste off and maybe it helps a bit with bacteria. However, water that’s not too hot to put in your mouth is just the temperature bacteria like.
I don’t know why they call it a boiler furnace. To me, the name “boiler” means that it should be boiling and making steam, which it doesn’t. But, for whatever reason, that’s what they call it. Another name for it is baseboard water heat. I basically have a furnace, a circulating water pump, and short hot water radiators all around the baseboards of my house.
No, not the big clunky steam radiators. Like this:
It is very common in boiler furnaces for the furnace to also heat the domestic hot water. It’s just an extra pipe coil going through the core of the furnace. The furnace puts out enough BTUs to heat the entire house in the dead of winter, so providing a bit of extra heat for the domestic hot water is no biggie for the furnace.
On the plus side, it’s often described as the most comfortable house heating system, which I agree with, and my kids can take whatever long showers they want and I never run out of hot water. I could literally turn the hot water on full in the shower and just let it run 24/7/365 and I would never run out of hot water (until the water company shut off my service after I wouldn’t be able to pay the bill).
On the negative side, the big cast iron core of the furnace always stays hot, even in the heat of summer. So from an energy efficiency point of view, it costs more to run than a more modern type of system. To me, the extra cost is worth it, and when my 40-year-old furnace died a few years back, I had basically the same thing installed to replace it (though the new one is a lot smaller and is a lot more energy efficient than the original as well). Some folks don’t like the radiators and/or prefer something more energy efficient.
The cold water comes in, goes through the furnace, and out through the taps. It spends so little time in the pipes that I don’t consider a problem even to use as cooking or drinking water. If it could pick up any significant amount of nasties from the inside of the pipes that quickly, then I think conventional hot water tanks would be downright toxic, and that’s not true.
I have sensitive teeth, so I clean my teeth using warm water.
People use cold water?
That just seems painful. Warm water all the way.
Warm (hot) water seems to rinse the brush better.
As for brushing, I just wet the brush. Temperature is not important.
Warm/Hot water dissolves sugars better/faster. I use water that is quite warm just to liquefy any sugars so they can be brushed/rinsed away.
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