Not needed because you shouldn’t be using warm water to wash your hands. Cold only.
(found the brit)
Canadian.
There are! They’re called thermostatic faucets.
I’m amazed at the comments explaining incoming water temperature fluctuations and pressures…
No no, thermostatic tap/faucet mixes waters depending on the output temperature. Ignores all of the variables except the thermal mass (I guess reaction speed) of the thermostatic system.
I think they are normally like 10x the price of a standard mixer tap tho.
So, it’s a budget choiceYeah, and obviously if the ‘hot’ water isnt hot, there isn’t anything it can do.
I have a feeling like you could do a completely mechanical one. Like a way to push it open and a part gets pushed out to stay put so when you open the faucet back up it bumps it and has a little resistance when it first turns so you don’t accidentally move it. Rotate the full way around to reset.
My kitchen faucet does this. It’s a 2-axis lever. Y axis is the temperature adjustment, X axis is flow. As long as you leave it set to the same Y position when you turn it off and on, it’ll be at the “last used combination”.
It’s reasonably common for showers to have a mixing valve and a flow rate valve on separate handles. That accomplishes what you want. You just have to remember which is which and only use the flow rate valve to turn on and off.
More importantly, hot water circulation systems should be more common. It’s the waiting for the cold water in the line to flush out that really makes setting temperature a hassle.
and when the hot water heater is two floors down and the pipe from there runs up unheated parts of the building, it takes a very long time to get even a hint of warmth out of the hot water faucets.
i’ve lived 3 minutes away from hot water for nearly thirty years now. it sucks. if i ever get money enough to own a house, or choose where i live with little regard to cost, it will have instant hot water (tankless water heaters).
hot water circulation systems should be more common
That just sounds like a waste of energy. Why not have the water heater right next to your shower, so that there’s no wait? It’s how it was set up in my parents home. Really enjoyed that setup, never had to wait for hot water.
I’m irritated by these half-measures. Just bathe in the hot water heater!
Actually, fuck yeah. My parents also have one of those bad boys:
It’s really nice to bathe in!
As a kid, I saw an old movie with one of these in action. A dude and a lady were victims about to be eaten with the soup, and had to move around in it swishing the liquid and tipping the pot. Good stuff…
Because the kitchen isn’t always wall to wall with the bathroom?
That’s still confusing to me. My parents had the water heater tank in the bathroom, between the shower/bath and the sink. The kitchen sink had a separate small water heater.
It’s really a question of whether you have electric heating or a furnace or district heating.
It’s not common to have more than one heat exchanger for hot water if you have a furnace or district heating.
Electrical is much easier. You can just place them anywhere and they don’t cost as much to install. However, electricity is usually more expensive than district heating.
I once had a place with the separate small water heater for kitchen. Could barely get the dishes done. I prefer having to wait a minute for the bathroom gigantic tank water to make it to the kitchen. Actually my system is way more complex, but that’s irrelevant for this discussion. I have 3 big tanks, two of which are powered by wood (so usually cold unless it’s cold outside and I make fires). By turning some valves on or off I can get water from different tanks to different faucets, though not all combinations are possible. Perks of a 40 year old house that grandpa later made more improvements on, lol
Most houses in the US have a single water heater, usually in the basement or utility room, with pipes running all through the house.
On demand recirculating works reasonably well but only for people who tolerate it. Push button, wait 3 min, water hot. It works for me but I know it’s way too much trouble for other people. It saves water and energy.
If you have a consistent schedule, you can also use timers for those so you don’t always need to remember to run it.
Oh, yeah, that makes much more sense actually. Now I kinda want that setup, but I bet it’s expensive.
The basic recirculation system is less than $300. Controlling the pump is the only thing you would have to add.
The pump comes with a built-in timer so you could turn the pump off while you sleep but that is not very granular.
A $15 relay plug will handle it no problem. How you control that relay plug is a rabbit hole- you can use the normie apps and their cloud servers crawling your local network but you get voice commands and remote control with very little effort. Or you can set up home assistant and have the pump run every time you turn on the bathroom lights, and when you unplug your phone from overnight charging, and when your phone connects to the house Wi-Fi upon arrival home from work.
I assume electric showers are pretty rare over there? We’d have like a 16mm2 cable ran to the bathroom for a 10.5kW shower. And with one of those it’s practically instant heat, and enough to heat high flow.
I prefer a water shower, thanks
I’ve never seen one. We’ve got on-demand water heaters that feed entire homes, but the electric versions are notorious for breaking a lot. The trend is toward heat pump hot water storage tanks that cool the air around them and put that heat into the water tank.
Thanks for info, good to learn.
I thought a hot water circulator would be great, and it kind of is, but it comes with a drawback that I hadn’t considered. If you want cold water from the tap, to fill a glass of water at night for example, you have to wait for that just as long as you would have had to for the hot water before!
The solution to that is for a third return line to be run during a new build or remodel, but that’s definitely not a weekend project for most homes.
My super basic faucet handles are exactly that…you twist it left-right to set temp and tilt it up-down for pressure from off to full. We just leave it rotated wherever we like it for temp and tilt up to turn on each time to the desired pressure. Our water pressure is always variable, so the amount tilted up varies, but the “rotational temp” almost never needs changing. There’s no fancy thermostatic valve in these like some shower have. There’s even those fancy kitchen sink faucets that remember everything and you just tap them with your hand and they automatically turn on/off to your settings of temp and pressure. I think they are called “touchless faucets”. Pretty sure even Ikea sells one.
I feel like sink handles like mine are super common, too. I’ve had similar ones in the states and in Europe…
Indeed :). That’s what these are.
Keep in mind that mixing the levels of hot and cold water isn’t the only factor in the final temperature. It’s also the actual temperature of the water in the pipes. Depending on where your pipes run, the cold water in the pipes may be warmer or cooler than the underground source of the water. The hot water may also have cooled more or less since leaving your hot water heater. Initial temperature may therefore be too hot or cold compared to where it ends after a period of use.
You mean a (single handle) mixer tap?
deleted by creator
single handles are all well and good, but I’d prefer a hot knob, a cold knob, and a flow knob. I’ve never been clear why this isn’t done, I suppose its probably cost. Maybe there is some wear and tare reason?
Seperate hot and cold knobs in showers are against code in a lot of places
Isn’t this thread about sinks?
Ah shit, you’re right. My brain just saw ‘faucet’
Why would you need separate hot and cold knobs if all that matters is the ratio between them?
Because sometimes you want full cold, sometimes you want full hot. Yes you could use a three way valve but you’d generally lose maximum water pressure.
I don’t understand how what you’re suggesting could work any differently than a standard mixer tap, where if you want full cold you turn it the way to cold, and pull all the way to fully open. You say “you’d generally lose maximum water pressure” - how does the mechanism you’re thinking of actually set the ratio of hot to cold, and how does it not lose pressure?
zheres your standard two tap mixer faucet:
At both taps full open you have full flow/pressure from both the hot water and cold water supply only restricted by the valve full open orifice.
Now add an additional valve to the mixed outlet of the faucet with both hot and cold feeding into the line that runs into it. If the valve is sized to accommodate the full flow from both valves feeding into it, the full combined pressure/flow from both cold mains and hot supply is available.
Also, once you set the temperature you like by turning the temp taps, that temp will be available to you at any flow rate on demand. Nothing you do to the mixed valve will change the temperature of the flow. This is especially useful if your hot temperature is very hot, you can have nice warm water to wash your hands every time without worrying you might scald yourself.
Ok, but what’s wrong with a standard single lever mixer, or a two handle (temp and flow) mixer? Never had a problem with them.
I’m so confused. What do the cold and hot knows even do?
they set the relative flow/pressure of respectively hot and cold water. The tap sets the total flow from minimum to maximum available based on the pressure supplied from.thenother two, allowing the selected hot/cold ratio to be preserved between on/off cycle, while also allowing for just a small stream of water when you need it, or a full flow of water when you need to fill a vessel or blast a dish.
everytime
Not a word, my dude.
they will be ok in life
People here saying single handle faucets must have much better ones than what we’ve got where I’m from, no fucking chance of getting the same temperature again after shutting it. And the middle of it is extremely sensitive, it goes from 10% to 90% in like the middle two millimeters, and I think the pressure of the hot water overcomes the cold’s so you have to turn a bit left and then right again to stabilize the temp.
For my shower, which is the one that matters most for me, I got a thermostatic one—you set the temperature on the right handle and the flow on the left one, and that’s it, perfect temperature forever. Even if someone flushes, which only happens when my sister is visiting because she doesn’t understand boundaries, it doesn’t change one whole degree for more than a second, only the flow is be affected.
As a side note my grandma’s bath tube some 30+ years ago (it had probably another 30 or more) had two handles for hot-cold, left and right, and then another two for the shower-faucet flow, up and down. It wasn’t as fine tuned as my modern one, but worked quite well. You would only open or shut without touching the proportion of hot/cold.
my grandma’s bath tube
Your grandma bathed in a tube?
