Why do some bathroom sinks have separate spouts for hot and cold water? Is the thinking that you’d never want to have warm water, either all hot or all cold? I once rented an apartment with a sink like that and it annoyed me no end.
You usually see these in older apartment buildings, but I’ve seen such fixtures fairly recently (i.e. in the last 10 years) so they apparently still sell them. What’s the advantage?
This is a bit of a WAG. A single faucet is a much less complicated piece of plumbling than a mixing fixture. In older constructions, to save costs, people acccepted the inconvenience. Over time, this old-fashioned, inconvenient style becomes “classic” :rolleyes: and therefore continues to show up in new construction.
They annoy me, too.
I think it’s just personal preference. I find on the one-handle controls, for example, that the little ‘H-C’ label is missing and though I am fairly certainly hotter is towards the left (counterclockwise), sometime I am not certain and sit there wondering whether it just takes the hot water forever to get going or whether the thing is set on cold and these are reversed. Plus, many of the one-handle deals seem to have infinite degrees of cold water but the ‘warm’ zone is a tiny area before it goes to scalding hot, and the two handle system I find allows you finer control of the temperature.
Yarster
I don’t think they are talking about those. You may be too young to have experienced them–there were two spigots, each with their own handle. One ran pure hot water, the other ran pure cold. In order to put your hands in it, you mixed the water in the bowl first.
Now, we’ve progressd to two-handle-one-spigot fixtures, and the one-handle-one-spigot fixtures. Why do they still build two-handle-two-spigot fixtures? Same reasons they still build antiques, I guess.
My apartment has this same set-up. Your right, it’s a real pisser.
The building is older than dirt, so I asked my dad and step-mother what the point was. They surmissed that in the old days people would plug the sink and not continually run the water. Simply mix the right temperature water in the bowl and keep using it to clean the razor and whatnot. Furthermore, the guessed, its a fairly new tendancy to let the water run while you do your stuff. In the old days, they said, people conserved water much better. Makes some sense, I guess.
What really made me think they were on to something was when I talked to the landlord about the strange covered hole in the kitchen and the shoots at the end of the hall. He said that in the early days, people had coal burning stoves and the main boiler for the apartment was coal fired. He said the caretaker had to stoke the thing all the time and bring coal around to the different apartments. Now that’s one bitch of a job.
That made me think that people were in fact better at water conservation than we are used to now, thus, the change in water faucet design.
As far as why they still make them that way, I’m sure it’s some kind of misguided retro style thing.
But their initial existance I think is entirely logical. You see them now from the viewpoint of someone who’s used to the concept of blended hot and cold, and wonder why that wasn’t always the obvious choice.
But consider the chronology. Historically, people had a basin–just a big bowl–with a pitcher of water. They’d pour a little water in the basin and use that to wash their face, etc. To take a whole bath, they had a tub, which they’d fill with water heated on a stove.
The first running-water sinks were one evolutionary step from those: a basin that you’d fill with water and use like the older, ceramic basins. You’d put in a little cold, a little of this newfangled hot water, and mix it to the right temperature in the basin, just as you’d always done.
I’m sure it was a while before people became accustomed to the entirely new concept of running hot water and someone had the utterly original idea of blending them as they “ran.”
Here’s a theory as to why you still see them around.
It may be impossible to retrofit an old (but still good) basin to use a mixed-temp faucet. The holes in a basin must be an exact distance apart to accept the mixed-temp faucet; not so with the hot/cold-only style. So maybe those old basins have oddly spaced faucet holes.
I’ve seen this set-up before: a horizontal pipe fitted between the two separate faucets, attached by a bend at each end. The blended water flows out through a hole in the middle of a pipe. Seems like a fairly easy thing to engineer.
It used to be required by the code in certain locations, specifically in the UK.
from http://www.hps.com/~tpg/ukdict/ukdict-3.html
All of the arguments here on why separate hot and cold taps exist in older buildings in the US are fine and convincing. So what is it with the UK??? When I talk about this with people here, everyone tries to convince me that somehow separate hot and cold taps are “better” than a mixed tap. Sure, when I’ve just put soap on my hands, I want to rinse them in alternate streams of freezing cold, then scalding hot, water.
lee, you’re right about cisterns feeding the hot water heater in older houses, but few newer houses have them. (Somewhere along the line, people realised that pigeons and other creatures of the air love to drop feathers and worse into the cistern. Imagine showering with that water.) So is the continued use of separate taps due to inertia by plumbers, or by customers?
My WAG would be that is has to do with the water pressure. You don’t want cold water backing up the hot water line, or vice-versa. The hot water heater in my house has a feature that automatically adjusts the pressure to equal the pressure in the main lines, which is why our hot water loses pressure when someone flushes the toilet. Older systems don’t have this.
When I was in college I lived in an apartment that had these. I never figured out to fill the bowl first!!! I aways just moved my hands back and forth from scalding hot and freezing cold. I feel so dumb now.
Well, I think that the inertia is customer driven. Some people want the old fashioned look. I suppose the code may still require separate tabs in some places.
The origin of UK water supplies is fascinating in itself(no really).
Much of it was as a result of fears of a Napoleonic invasion.Every house was required to have a viable supply of potable water capable of lasting for some period of time hence the header tank in most UK houses.It took generations to actually achieve this.
Water supply was unreliable and it is only relatively recently that mains water pressure could be guarunteed so there never was any reason to have a constant pressure system such as there is on much of the Continent.
When you have cold water fed by a header tank in the loft and hot water through the hot water boiler, which will cause a pressure drop across it, then it is very difficult to achieve a balance of pressure through both lines for the ideal mixer tap.
The result is that if someone turns on a tap elsewhere in the vicinity there can often be a large and potentially damaging temperature change in an already running tap or shower.
You can go into public buildings like hospitals where I have worked and you will find that the bath and shower outlets are on a single tap with a preset temperature , the elderly and ill do not always recognise when they are being further injured by hot water.
This is possible because such buildings have booste pumps to the mains supply so ensuring a steady pressure.
The UK market is very resistant to change, we are used to our arrangements and there is no real pressing need to change them as it would require new sinks, baths and taps and the house would have to be partly replumbed and central heating systems would probably need modification.
The cost would be prohibitive and the percieved gains would be small.
During a recent visit to South Wales I was at a friend’s home and noticed water pouring out on to the street from a wall in the house next door. I asked my friend what this was and he said it was the overflow of a toilet tank. I explained to him that in every other country I’ve been to, this overflow goes down to the toilet bowl which is much simpler and also allows you to notice it and get the tank fixed. He said in the UK the code requires that it go outside but he couldn;t give me a reason.
He told me his neighbor’s overflow had been pouring water out on to the garden for months.