Baths - Steel or acrylic - Which is best?

[Ed Sirett]

Steel is cheaper and stronger. The plastic is warmer (but really it not a problem with either) and comes in a bigger variety of shapes and colours.

[mcbrien410]

What about colours? My 1981 bathroom suite is the same colour as the Gills of a Mushroom. These days it seems that you can have any colour as long as it is white.

Chris.

[Mary Fisher]

Hurrah!

Mary

[Guy King]

The message from "Dave Plowman (News)" contains these words:

Hmm, they're durable but they also take forever to warm up. Unless you have the hot-feed wrapped round the back of the head-end to preheat it I'll pass on cast iron if you don't mind. Can't stand leaning back against a cold slab.

[Mary Fisher]

No they don't!

They're at room temperature!

I sometimes wonder about some folk ... :-)

Mary

>

[Guy King]

The message from [e-mail] contains these words:

Yeah, I hate cleaning the bath, too.

[Mary Fisher]

An enamelled cast iron bath takes very little cleaning - just a spray with the shower :-)

Mary

[Helen Deborah Vecht]

"Mary Fisher" typed

Don't know about you, but I like my bathwater to be rather warmer than room temperature (probably 40°C or 104°F).

My flesh is approximately 37°C and my room is about 21°C. A bath with sides of 30° will still feel cold.

It will also cool the bath water.

Nor can I.

So do I...

[Adrian Boliston]

When I replaced my bathroom at my old home I got a "carronite" bath, which I think cannot be beaten as it has the strength of steel yet the warmth of plastic.

[Nick]

It is possible to polish an acrylic bath with Brasso, and it comes up as good as new. Once a steel bath becomes worn it's a huge job to resurface it.

[DJC]

But the weight of the water is evenly distributed. Stepping into, or out of, a bath is another matter.

[Bob Eager]

In any case, Mary's room will (she will probably claim) be at 0 degrees, what with the 3 foot stone walls, the beaten earth floor etc. The only heating will be a small cow.

[Helen Deborah Vecht]

"Bob Eager" typed

Each to his/her own.

I am *really* unusual. I live in a centrally heated, double-glazed, 3 bedroomed 1930s semi-detached house ;-)

[Guy King]

The message from "Bob Eager" contains these words:

But think how warm it gets when it has a widdle. When I milked cows as a teenager the water heater was rarely working and you learned on bitterly cold days that a stream of cow urine is nice and warm.

[Dave]

Room temp here might be as low as 28 F as wifey likes to open the bathroom window after her shower in the morning. I like to take a bath in the evening, as my little job can make me sweat a tad. By this time, room temp is also the bath temp is outside temp. As others have said, a cast iron bath takes ages to warm up.

Dave

[Ian White]

Rather than remove our over-sized steel bath when it became ratty, we had it lined with a drop-in acrylic shell which gave the same advantages.

[Andy Hall]

Think what you could do with the chocolate taps though :-)

[Guy King]

The message from Helen Deborah Vecht contains these words:

You didn't mention the priest-hole. No, really, she's got a priest-hole.

[Chris Cowley]

Blimey. That makes me wish I hadn't stuck a lump hammer through ours and thrown it in a skip when we moved in 7 years ago!

[Helen Deborah Vecht]

Guy King typed

And you didn't mention the *other* priest hole...