It is so when you wake up on a Sunday morning in the wrong house with a splitting headache and you stagger into the bathroom for a nice cold drink of water you do not burn your mouth because the taps are the wrong way around.
Or is there another reason why hot is usually on the left?
The explanation I had from my grandfather some 50 years ago was:
a. people used to have just one tap - for cold water - which was on the right as most people are right-handed; b. when this new-fangled running hot water came along (from, for example, the gas geyser) the tap for that was added to the left; and c. so a convention (of sorts) was born.
Should I put this on Wikipedia so it must be true?
By the way, in our house they are the other way around. On the other hand, as we do not have any water tanks in the loft you could at least be confident of not drinking an infusion of drowned rat.
And when we moved into our house they varied from room to room!
Now that I've rebuilt most of the rooms they are all consistent: hot, left; cold right.
If I ever come across the plumber (and his mate the joiner, not forgetting also his mate the plasterer) who worked on this place when it was built...
Some blame also on the original owners who accepted the pipes that bang when you turn them off, doorways that are miles out of square and walls that have 2" of plaster at the top and 0.5" at the bottom to create a truly original 'Leaning Tower of Pisa' effect on a chimney breast!
My office has 3 "kitchenettes" for making tea, coffee, etc.
One of them has the tap on the other side to the other two.
Just to prove the plumber's abilities they all have different taps, oriented in different directions, and in the case of the one with the long easy-use levers you can't turn the taps on full because the levers hit the wall.
But he did a *far* better job than the aircon installers...
I always thought that the hot tap was nearest the wall, i.e. furthest away from the small child to avoid scalding. Most houses I've had were plumbed like that.
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