Senility is...

[The Natural Philosopher]

...turning on the cold tap and waiting for hot water to come out ;-)

[Fredxx]

Admission being another feature?

I have come across taps that are the opposite way from convention.

[Chris Green]

Lots of people don't realise that there *is* a standard/convention.

[Andrew]

joining "reform"

[Tim Lamb]

In message <um3s5k$1i0b0$ [e-mail], The Natural Philosopher [e-mail] writes

Hah! Not done that yet..

>

[Colin Bignell]

Then going to repair the hot water system as it isn't working?

[The Natural Philosopher]

No, definitely not. Senility is voting Tory or Labour and expecting anything to change. Except for the worse.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think that is probably what happens in the next ten years...

[Sam Plusnet]

Why bother with a "standard" for such an trivial matter?

Next you'll be telling me on what side of the road I should drive.

[NY]

*Is* there a standard for the placement of hot and cold taps? I've come across some houses where the kitchen sink was one way round and the bath and wash basin taps were the other way round.

The real problem is mixer taps with a single control that rocks forwards/backwards for controlling the rate of flow and rotates clockwise/anticlockwise for temperature. There seems to be no standard at all for those - and few taps even have any markings for which way you rotate the control to go from cold to hot. It would have been so easy for those taps to be engraved with a clockwise/anticlockwise double-headed arrow with H and C beside the relevant arrow heads.

With the mixer tap in the kitchen, I just turn it one way and if the water doesn't run warm I turn it the other way. I can never remember which direction is hot, and the pipe runs are so long in our house that it takes ages for the hot water to reach the sink. OK, it's a combi boiler so it takes a little while for the water to run hot even as it comes out of the boiler, but even with pre-heat enabled (so the boiler maintains a small reservoir of hot water to cover the period until the boiler is heating on demand) the delay between water being hot as it leaves the boiler and running hot at the kitchen tap is a good minute or so, even at fairly fast flow rates.

[Colin Bignell]

In the USA there is and it is recommended in the UK. The cold should be on the right, as most people are right handed. That way, a blind or partially sighted person is more likely to turn on the cold first, reducing the risk of scalding. It is quite theoretical and far from universal. My house has the hot on the right, but, given the time it takes for the hot water to come through, scalding is not really a risk.

I've come

[Jeff Gaines]

My bath and kitchen taps are the right way round, the bathroom & loo wash basin taps are the other way round.

[NY]

I've never yet come across a hot tap that runs hot immediately it is turned on, unless it was used only a minute or so before. Maybe if the pipes are end-to-end plastic (right from the boiler or cylinder to the tap) there is less heat loss than with copper pipe. Our present house has copper pipes as the "backbone" with plastic spurs off it to the taps.

Amusingly, although it originally had hot water fed from a tank in the loft (so at very low pressure compared with mains pressure), someone had chosen to use 15 mm pipe rather than the 22 mm which is normally used for tank-fed hot water to compensate for the lower pressure. Consequently the flow rate on the hot water was puny compared with the cold. When we had to have a new boiler, we went for mains-fed combi, so the 15 mm hot water pipes are fine - it's easy to balance hot and cold flow rates in mixer taps or by turning separate taps the same number of turns.

[Colin Bignell]

Hot water recirculation systems and instant flow electric boilers can both produce hot water almost instantaneously.

[Tim Streater]

Hot on the left, cold on the right.

[alan_m]

Effectively that's a radiator that you leave on all Summer :)

[Colin Bignell]

It is commonly used in hotels. Guests don't have to wait a long time for hot water and less water is run to waste while waiting for it.

[Owain Lastname]

I never thought of that before, and I'm 55.

Owain

[brian]

Mine in the futility room are the opposite way round but are helpfully labelled "main" and "hot". Maybe the standard was invented after 1907.

Brian

[The Natural Philosopher]

There is no standard, but there us a convention.

I am not sure my parents house didn't have them the other way around, but I cannot remember.