You’re double-counting there. If you filled the tub that full, then that obese male would displace quite a bit of the water when he got in the tub, so you can’t count both.
Depth makes a big difference in how much water is needed. I was estimating a luxury bath with a 18 inch depth.
The average home tub is more like yours and about 10 to 12 inches at most.
t-bonham makes a valid point. I didn’t consider water displacement when someone gets in the tub. My mistake, glad someone caught it.
Because for the most part, people don’t want to take naps in there.
By and large, most folks are either in a tub to get clean, which is more easily accomplished when you’re sitting up and can reach the soap, shampoo, etc, or to lounge with a book, glass of wine, etc, which is also easier sitting up. And, historically speaking, modern standard tubs are luxuriously large. Back when water had to be hauled and heated by hand, tubs were much smaller.
There is a dick joke in there, but I’m not going to go after it.:p:D
I don’t take sit-down baths very often (that’s more of a girl-thing, n’est-ce pas?) but I’ll remark this of the times I did: Standard tubs are obnoxiously uncomfortable to sit in, even with water. Enough so that I’ll stick with stand-up showers.
this is why I prefer the kind of tubs I encountered in Japan. They were even shorter than the “standard” american bathtub, but were significantly deeper. much easier to sit up with a comfortable level of submersion.
Not so. Previous thread. People were a bit shorter in centuries past, but only an inch or two.
The average bath has to fit in the average bathroom.
I think small bathroom is the answer. I am 5’9" and never fit in bathtubs. I love a hot bath in the winter but they are generally uncomfortable affairs.
according tothis, a 72 42 tub only holds 82 gallons.
Only once he’s lying down and floating in the water. If you fill a bath full up to the brim, then step into it, the floor is bearing the weight of all the water, plus your body weight, minus the weight of water displaced by your feet and lower legs(not much).
Sure, the weight will go down when you lie down and the water displaced by your body goes down the overflow, but the peak load may be higher than the weight of the filled bath. Maybe somewhat moot, because I doubt this happens very often.
IOW, it’s less than the weight of 8 people. Modern houses are obviously built to support more than 8 people standing in an area that large so that can’t be it.
about the weight:
old clawfoot tubs, as mr. fluff pointed out, are already heavier and were larger–and they concentrated all their weight on 4 localized points–not evening distributing it across the whole bottom.
not to mention old flooring didn’t usually have plywood or sheet underlaying–it was thin tongue and groove oak or pine, lain directly on the joists–and the slats weree usually just a few inches wide.
there’s a LOT of exacerbating symptoms for a fall-through, is what i’m saying, and i never heard of it happening, so it was at the very least infrequent.
Another vote for small bathrooms. Ever seen the bathrooms in houses from when indoor plumbing was first becoming common? A five-foot/one-and-a-half meter tub still takes up as much as half of the space. And most families wouldn’t have used the tub every day at that time.
When a house does have a larger bathroom, many people are now opting for a separate shower stall. That’s what we chose when we had our bathroom enlarged. With no little kids in the house any more, we use the tub only a few times a month, but the shower is in heavy daily use. When you’ve set aside the space for the shower stall, you need a bathroom large enough to hold square dances in to still have the space for a tub a tall adult can lie down in.
The market is probably still too small for most manufacturers to bother with extra long tubs, and too small for most bathroom supply stores to stock any that are out there.
Modern plumbed-in baths evolved from the older claw-foot type (with or without hot running water), which in turn evolved from a tin tub in front of the hearth, with water warmed in metal jugs or pans and poured in.
Throughout the course of that evolution, there’s a general increase in size, but it’s probably never been hugely desirable to have a full-length bath - because bathing hasn’t ever really been about stretching out at full length and just lying there - it’s about scubbing, soaping, then immersing various bits of the body in turn in order to get clean.
EUREKA!!!
(sorry…But somebody had to say it.)
I’d like an upright tub design. Imagine a shower stall with a solid door that is about three feet high. You would have a swimming pool type ladder on the door, climb in and sit. With around the same volume of water as a typical bathtub, you could sit fully submerged.
They exist - google upright bathtub or* soaking bathtub * - looks like there are two kinds - those that you climb into from the top, and those that have a door in the side (obviously can only be opened when the tub is empty) - the latter sort being primarily marketed to disabled people who either can’t step into a bath, or can’t safely lie down in one.
ETA: I imagine they probably use a fair bit more water than a conventional bath - by a factor of two or more, just because people wouldn’t want to be confined to a narrow vertical water-filled tube.
Did she even die in a bathtub?
That’s the first thing I thought of too. It’s not weight. It’s just the available room.
I just did a huge remodel completely redoing the main bath and kitchen. I bought a 5.5 foot tub that is extra deep. The extra depth and extra 6 inches helps a lot.