Thats one of my gripes with the UK. What's with this 2 taps thing? One to scold and one to freeze, no mixer.
Thats one of my gripes with the UK. What's with this 2 taps thing? One to scold and one to freeze, no mixer.
The usual:
Pollution
Lack of space/crowds
Lousy (overpriced) shopping
My wonderful dear friends make up for all of the above though, have learned to love the place!
I asked a plumber about that once in the UK. His answer was that to have a single tap that mixed hot and cold water you'd have to have non-return valves in the pipes. He said it like it was some kind of big deal, though I'd assume that every other first world country can manage it without collapsing.
I lived in one UK place that did use a single tap and thought it was brilliant. Until I noticed that it was both freezing cold and scalding hot at the same time. Looking closer, the tap was two concentric tubes, the outer delivering cold water and the inner delivering a stream of hot water. So you could burn and freeze yourself at the same time. It was possibly the stupidest plumbing invention I have ever seen.
people living in public housing estates driving BMW, Benz..(may be jealous because I don't have a car and have to pay tax this month).
Last edited by ghkg; 08-01-2014 at 10:55 AM.
The reason we got for the two taps is that in older buildings there would be a water tank in the attic (to fill up the hot water heater?), and all kinds of things could end up in there (including dead squirrels), so you wouldn't want to mix the hot water with the fresh tap water. Also, traditionally, did they plug the sink, turn on both taps, fill up the sink and then wash their hands? Seems nasty, particularly in a public sink, but my partner said he saw colleagues doing this.
In one of our flats in London, the aforementioned water tank was in the bedroom closet!!! Somehow -- in the 21st century -- the water pressure wasn't good enough to get up to the 3rd floor, so there was a tank there to supply the bathroom (but somehow not the hot water heater in the kitchen, if I recall correctly). The pressure from the tank to the bathroom wasn't good enough either, so the landlady installed an electric pump that would turn on every time you turned on the sink and flushed the toilet. It was like a bloody power generator went on in your bedroom. The tank, also, was open and not covered, and full of dust and some small bugs.
All normal, it seemed, to a Brit, and the landlady insisted the previous tenants LOVED the place!
Anyway, it is a never ending joke now in our "modern" HK home -- oooooo, look! The tap turns on and comes up THIRTY floors!!! (This goes along with the jokes about how amazingly the windows and closet doors close here!)