Fuck mixer taps

[pozorvlak]

We've recently moved house, to a refitted Victorian tenement flat in Leith. We're renting it from a lovely couple from Continental Europe, and this I suspect is the reason for one of the few things that annoy me about the place: that every sink in the flat is fitted with mixer taps. Ordinarily this is merely a mild irritant, but occasionally (as happened this morning), they drive me into a towering rage. Let me explain...

I'd taken out the contents of the food recycling bin, but a foul-smelling brown gunge still coated the insides of the bin itself. I was therefore filling the bin with a mix of bleach and hot water, the latter from the bathroom sink. The sink was too small to fit the bin in, so I was filling a pint cup with hot water from the sink and tipping it into the bin. Fortunately it's quite a small bin. My attention lapsed for a moment, though, and the water overflowed, mildly but painfully scalding my left hand. No problem: I could keep filling the hot water with my right hand, while holding my left hand under the cold tap for as long as it took to cool down. Except, oh, wait, mixer taps. Dammit. So I had to turn off the hot tap, put down the cup, turn on the cold tap, and wait uselessly for however long it took for my hand to stop hurting.

Except I had forgotten about the other problem with mixer taps: hysteresis. When you turn off the hot water in a mixer tap system, you see, you don't reset the tap to a safe state: a slug of hot water remains in the pipe, lying in wait for the unwary. And so when I put my sore hand under the tap and turned on the cold water, I was instead treated to a high-pressure dose of painfully hot water onto the already painful area.

And then a few minutes later, while mentally composing this blog post and muttering curses against the inventors of mixer taps and their descendents, yea, unto the seventh generation, the same thing happened to me again.

In conclusion: fuck mixer taps. Fuck them right in their stupid single non-parallelisable pain-causing water outlets.

This post is dedicated to elmyra, who labours under the misapprehension that mixer taps are not only a superior technology, but so obviously a superior technology that the only possible reason they have not been universally adopted can be ignorance of their existence.

Comments

[pozorvlak]

"Spout"! If I'd have been able to remember that word, this post would have been much more comprehensible.

Perhaps this is a Sapir-Whorf thing, but I generally want either cold water for drinking and handwashing, or hot water for cleaning things. For dishwashing, in which the water must be hot enough to clean plates but not hot enough to scald my hands, I'm filling a basin anyway so a single tap brings no advantage. I will happily make an exception for showers: a single temperature-controllable nozzle is clearly the Right Thing there.

[elvum]

Have you considered the advantages of washing your hands in warm water? :-)

[pozorvlak]

I was at the gym tonight, where the sinks have separate taps, and noticed that I used the hot tap to wash my hands. So I think, as weaselspoon suggests, the answer is to turn down the temperature of the hot water supply. On the other hand, while warm water removes dirt more effectively than cold, it makes no difference to microbial load reduction.

The taps in our flat are actually the worst of both worlds: there's a single spout per sink, leading to the problems with forced serialisation and hysteresis described above, but the water is controlled by two knobs, so getting water of a given intermediate temperature is still nontrivial.