It’s been a year since we moved into our new apartment and we’ve only just discovered how to get hot water out of our bathroom faucet.
Our bathroom sink has a fairly simple-looking faucet. It’s just a ball, maybe a bit smaller than a baseball, mounted atop a spout. If you turn the ball clockwise, a screw loosens and water comes out. Turning the ball counterclockwise tightens the screw and shuts off the water.
The problem is that the water is frigid. (Vienna’s water comes directly from alpine springs, via an aqueduct.) We initially figured that the tap, like so many other ones here in Europe, was connected only to the cold water supply. But looking underneath the sink, we saw that both hot and cold water pipes were indeed connected to the faucet. For months we tried various ways of manipulating the ball to get hot water to come out. We tried tilting it forwards and backwards or from side to side, but it doesn’t tilt. We tried pulling it up and pushing it down, but it doesn’t move on that axis either.
Last week I finally discovered accidentally how to get hot water: you simply keep turning the ball clockwise. That is, when you first start turning the ball, a trickle of cold water comes out, and as you turn it more and more, the cold water increases from a trickle to a gush. But if you keep turning while the cold water is gushing, the hot water starts to mix in. So you can
start from a lukewarm gush and, if you keep turning, get all the way to a scalding hot gush.
For our purposes, this arrangement is completely useless. There is never a scenario in our household when we want lukewarm or scalding hot water to come gushing out of our bathroom sink. We want cold moderate flows (to fill up the ferret water dish) and lukewarm trickles (for brushing our teeth) and warm moderate flows (for washing our hands). As is, the faucet provides only the first of these.
Is there a name for the type of mixer faucet we have? The design seems so strange to us that we can’t imagine why anyone would want one for the bathroom. Is there perhaps some other use case that it is more suitable for? (Maybe whoever furnished the bathroom picked the wrong kind of faucet by mistake?)
Systems like these are to prevent accidental burns. You can’t get to hot water without running the cold first, so you, a guest or a child won’t turn the tap and get scalded immediately.
Sounds like your tap is not a great implementation, but the concept itself is sound.
No, the concept is awful. Those faucets only let you choose the temperature, but you get whatever volume of water happens to come out at that temp. I have something similar in my shower and, at the temp I want, there’s way too much water for my liking. So it makes me waste hot water, which I really hate doing.
Faucets are one of those things that are so often annoyingly over-designed to give a trendy look. None of the trendy-looking designs are a functional improvement, and when you encounter them in unfamiliar situations like hotels they are just an annoyance. Any faucet where use isn’t immediately obvious is a bad design.
I’ve encountered that once or twice in US hotel rooms, for the bath/shower. For which it may make some sense (see point in second post about avoiding accidental scalding). Still don’t like it. Not the least because often it’s not obvious how to make them work properly. I shouldn’t have brain cramps trying to figure out the bathroom fixtures.
I often see the same arrangement in sinks in public handicapped bathrooms (I’m not handicapped myself, but often the handicapped bathroom is also the designated baby changing area). Like you, I wouldn’t want one in my home.
As long as we’re mentioning designs that seem reasonable on the surface, what about those sinks in public restrooms with no knobs, just sensors that turn the water on when you put your hands under the faucet. They have two issues:
On a lot of them it requires much literal hand waving to get them to come on. This is frequently an issue for me.
The water comes out freezing cold and you have to wait a minute or two with your hands being blasted by the cold water for it to warm up. This was a huge issue for me when I was having chemo. It made it impossible for me to wash my hands in a lot of public restrooms.
Those big knobs in the OP are almost as bad as the old-style sinks where the hot faucet is all the way on the left side of the sink and the cold is all the way to the right, and ne’er the two shall meet.
Yes, I’ve seen these in showers a lot, where you either don’t care about controlling flow volume, or the shower head itself has a control for flow volume.
I always feel like an inept wizard, who can’t figure out how to make the right gesture to get the spell to work.
This is not in any way helped by the fact that the right gesture seems to be different for each faucet style. Figuring out one public john is no help in figuring out another.
The old house had a lever under the modern-style single knob that let you control the water volume. The new one does not, but as someone said, valves that can be installed behind the shower head to control water flow are cheap, easy to find, and easy to install. They generally just have a little lever that you can rotate one way or the other. You probably need some plumber’s tape (that thin white mylar-like stuff) wrapped around the threads to get a good seal.
ETA: As for water temperature, I believe most building codes in North America now require a hot water temperature limiter to be installed down at the hot water tank. They have an adjustment screw that controls the proportion of cold water that is mixed in with the hot.
I’m back at home and so I gave this a try just now. The delivery pipes do have knobs but unfortunately they don’t budge when I try to twist them. Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow with a wrench, though I’m a bit leery about this as they look delicate.
A faucet that doesn’t allow independent temperature and flow control ain’t worth a dam.
I have a different problem. I moved into a condo last summer. The pipes in the shower are not round; they have a square cross-section and a large square at that. The result is that the standard caddies for holding soap and shampoo don’t fit and there are no shelves or anything else inside the shower. Another triumph of design over function. But at least temperature and flow can be controlled independently.
Even if you can’t get the inflow pipe knobs to move, you might be able to fit a washer with a small orifice to one or both sides to get the effect you’re after. But you’d have to shut the water off upstream of the inflow pipes somehow.
This is a nitpicker’s nitpick, but I’m mentioning it for those who may go in search of Mylar plumber’s tape:
It’s not Mylar; it’s Teflon (AKA PTFE). Mylar is what candy bar wrappers tend to be made of. It’s no big deal to conflate these two, but both Teflon tape and Mylar tape are common; only Teflon tape will seal threaded plumbing joints.
