We have lousy hot water delivery. I frequently turn on the bathroom sink hot water to get hot water in the kitchen (we are going to install an auxiliary water heater in the coming kitchen revision)—and sometimes if you want a hot bath.
I most always shower. But I hurt so bad from a stint trimming iris leaves (filled half a monster green city bucket) that I opted for a hot soak.
As I finally reached tub-fill and continued to hear a water sound, I began to realize—it’s not the tub. It’s the—OMG! sink! The flood had gone over the sink, filled two drawers, and was cascading onto the floor.
I got out of the tub in a hurry, flung down towels and my bathrobe to try to stem the flood short of the hall laminate…and yelled for Jane.
Well, the flood went through the floor and down to the basement, so we had a double mopup, which actually saved the hall from getting wet. And we mopped, and moved makeup bottles, and generally mopped, mopped, mopped and now have a fairly dry bathroom, an only slightly soggy basement floor (the unfinished side, concrete) and a pile of towels and bathrobe in the washing machine.
Many a spouse would be furious and there’d be a fight for a week. Jane laughed and helped me mop. No recriminations, no fuss. Love is—sense of humor while mopping and bailing.
We ARE going to get that water heater.
Sounds like your delivery pipes might be silted up too. I don’t know what you do about that, but I do know that you are supposed to drain down your hot water heater annually.
I’m like Tommie. I think you’ve got gunked up pipes
Two on-demand water heaters — one for the kitchen, one for the bath, is the way I’d go, if wishes were horses.
I’m like you. I prefer to shower. I haven’t taken a bath in literally years. I’d have to vacuum the cat hair out of the bathtub to take a bath if I suddenly got the idea I had to have one.
That said, there are definitely times when a long soak in hot water is very therapeutic for overworked muscles.
You were running your sink to get hot water in the tub faster, and the sink got stuffed up and overflowed? Check your sink drain. Ours I have to watch like a hawk; DH and I both have long hair, and sometimes the cats help too by laying in the sink. The best thing I have found for clearing slow drains is Liquid Plumr Foaming Pipe Snake; the eco-friendly enzyme treatments rarely work on hair and soap clogs.
Our house has no room for hot water on demand heaters, otherwise, yep — one under the kitchen sink, and one in the bathroom. We had a solar hot water heater on the roof, which was apparently plumbed by Rube Goldberg; it got yanked when we had to replace the original hot water heater.
You can get actual snakes for basin drains – they can get the hair clogs out. I’d also recommend a hair strainer – either wire mesh or rubber – to catch most of the hair before it gets into the drain.
(The basin-drain snakes I’ve seen have replaceable plastic ends, so you can just toss them when you’ve gotten the clog out.)
The silicone rubber strainers by OXO come in two types: flat and domed. We have a domed one in the tub (the ‘ant fort’), and it keeps about 75% of the stray hair from going down the drain; the rest mostly gets snagged by the in-drain strainer. The drawback I have found to the domed hair catchers, wire or rubber, is that they never lay completely flat on the drain, so there’s always a little wiggle room for hair to sneak past.
I’ve tried one of the plastic drain snakes to remove built up hairballs in the p-trap, but have never successfully pulled out the clump I know must be down there.
The wire one I have (from “Peerless”) is the same outside diameter as the metal around the drain, so it fits nicely. I actually have it upside down, so the dome is in the drain (no pop-up in the tub). Then I can put the plastic one over it (mine is by “Helping Hand”) and get more straining-out.
The wire one actually has to have the soap-scum rinsed through. But it’s good at catching hair – it’s pretty fine.
We have one of those fancy bowl sinks (it was pretty, but it is not efficient.) It has a tiny, tiny drain that is just not as efficient as the (even smaller) water delivery, go figure.
BTW, we all knew Jane was a one off all this while!
Ow, your poor back! So much mopping on top of all the gardening won’t have helped it.
Have you got a hot water bottle, or a heating pad of some sort? I find that putting a hot water bottle behind my back, wherever I sit down, is very good for sore and stiff back muscles.
My neighbor lady is going to a physiotherapist at the moment, for gardening back pains, and has been given some exercises she finds really helps. The one I remember is right after the gardening, go and lie on your back on your bed (heating pad under the back optional) for a while, with your legs raised on the exercise ball she is working with. Maybe putting your calves up on a pile of pillows would work too?
Well, no great damage was done.
And suggestions are welcome. One of the major problems is that this is a ranch-style house, meaning long and thin—and the builder put the hot water tank at one end, and the bath and kitchen at the other. The cold water entry from the mains is at one end, and water has to go all the way to the other end of the house, get heated, and travel past the entry to the bath, then some fifteen feet over to the kitchen from the bath. Deposits in the pipes are indeed possible—the system was built in 1954. But putting a little on-demand electric heater under the kitchen sink so that hot water flows to it, gets heated to a proper degree, then up to the sink, is a good easy fix. I can even put it on a timer so that it delivers hot water only from 7 am to 5 pm, which would solve all problems of kitchen use.
Meanwhile I have 4 more monster clumps of iris, which I am attacking with a (good) chef’s knife. I ordered a machete for the job, but it arrived blunt as a blank cutout. Fiskars, no less. THat is going back. I am going to see if I can find one locally. But by then, I will have the iris done for the year.
My house is designed the same way–“takes a while”[1] to get hot water in the bathrooms. But fortunately there’s a sink with a deep “laundry tub” next to the laundry facilities in the utility room right behind the garage. If all I want to do is wash my hands, I walk to the other end of the house where it will come in seconds. (I can and have filled a 5gal bucket in that “sink”.)
My annoyance is the aerator on the bathroom sink puts bubbles under the drain pop-up, so even “up” water fills the bowl. I’ve tried adjusting it’s “lever arm” to raise it higher, but the curvatire of the sink is in the way. 🙁
[1] I suppose if I measured it it’s only about 90sec, but it SEEMS like a long time. Am I impatient?
I’ll let you know how we fare with the undercounter hot water tank. WE’re talking to a carpenter this Tuesday. (I know, I know, plumber, but we need some cabinet work.
Plumber, to move your hot water heater to the appropriate end of the house!
Saner home-designers try to put everything close together. My parents had their house designed so that all the hot-water lines were within 20 feet of the heater; the house had a kind of utility core, with the kitchen, the utility room, and the bathrooms in the middle, and the bedrooms and living areas on the ends. (The furnace, the water heater, and the water-softener were in the basement, roughly under the utility room.)
(They did get an instant-hot-water dispenser in the kitchen, but it tended to clog up from the hard-water deposits.)
Same problem here with on-sink hot water dispensers. Our water is very mineral laden, and one of our friends went through 2 of the dispensers in 2 years. I decided the spare hole in our sink was better put to use as the vent for our new dishwasher. 🙂
They had west Texas well water, with an impressive mineral content. (Somewhere close, I think, to my mother’s description of southeast Kansas well water: you need a cold chisel to get it out of the faucet.) The water softener didn’t feed the cold water tap in the kitchen, and I think it also didn’t feed the hot-water tap – because water softener salt doesn’t mix with low-sodium diets.
What I want to put in is a stubby real water heater in the underside of the sink. There are units that heat only about 2 gallons. The one I want heats more like 10-20 gallons.
There is another, cheaper, option I heard about on “Ask This Old House.” Under the sink, a pump is installed between the hot and cold pipes, with a switch.
When one wants hot water, to bathe, for instance, flip the switch. Water gets pumped from the hot water pipe down the cold water pipe. Where’s it going to go? Not the closed faucets–those pipes are filled with water going nowhere. No, it goes back to where room is being made for it, in the hot water heater. It’s still cold water until hot water gets to the pump. After however long it takes for the hot water to get there normally, you flip the switch to the pump off, open the faucet, and Voila! Hot water at your fingertips.
There’s still the same delay, but none of the “not hot yet” water goes down the drain! It’s pretty ingenious and cheap. Whadya think?
DH put in a circulating hot water system for the same problem. The hot water is constantly circulating so is always hot.
Comment Constant circulation also means the heater will run a LOT more. Only do that if you are certain you can afford the gas bill.
It sounds like a water heater on the end of the house by the kitchen and bath is a real plus. And ow, on the gardening and mopping and flooding. :-/ (Jane is awesome.)
I’d tried to post approx. Wednesday on the prior thread, but it didn’t appear to take, despite submitting it, and might be in the spam filter?
My cold/allergy/ weird flea med reaction seems to be (finally) on the way out, not entirely gone. Thankful.
I’ve just ordered more cat litter and moist cat food, and I *think* between Petco and PayPal and my browser, they all agreed on where I said to bill and ship, the new apt. — The large amount (4 medium jugs) of cat litter did not last as long as I’d estimated. Still getting used to more frequent changes of just one litter box instead of two, for my two kittehs. Litter box plus small bathroom..aaaiiieee.
I’m awaiting delivery from friends of mail mis-delivered to the apt. complex office (across the major highway from this half of the complex). Really hope they don’t “forget” overnight, which would mean my supplies get shipped back. Good friends, busy, not so good on follow-through on this, despite good intentions. Sigh.
Still haven’t been by my storage space in weeks, hoping to do so next week. Items needed and wanted from storage, some just fun, others, if I don’t find soon, I’ll have to order replacements meantime. (The crock pot I ordered still has not been shipped. Good thing I do have my wok and some other basics.) — LOL, my BJD crew, nice guitar, and camera among the “want, valuable, needs to be out of storage,” along with kitchen spices and pantry goods, etc., and office stuff. (Will have to order paper soon.) I still haven’t been around to find a small dining table and chairs or living room furniture. I did order a prefab desk and bookcase. Heh, priorities.
Other stuff is either in limbo or in progress. Doing OK but I want faster progress from myself.
Paul, I asked a plumber I know online about that booster pump, and he said his company had had problems with pinhole leaks developing in lines after a few years, using the pump. I don’t know why this should be, except that our pipes also date from 1954 and I kind of hate to risk it.
There is a safety reason houses were designed like ours–getting the sleeping quarters far away from the potentially dangerous utilities–many were. So one would wonder why those pumps never caught on. I suppose most places people didn’t care about wasting the water. But there is resistance in water flow (q.v. Reynolds Number), so if the pump was aggressive, in order to speed the arrival of the hot water, it would also increase the pressure in the pipes. Along with the natural corrosiveness of water, that could exacerdate such leaks.
paul on June 17, 2017 at 5:33 pm
My father altered the plumbing system so the main hot water line made a circuit and went back to the water heater – he said it’s a PITA to do, but it does make the delivery faster, because there’s always hot water in the pipes feeding the faucets. (It wasn’t too hard for him to do, because the house has a basement and the crawl space over that is easy to get in and out of.)
Looking forward to hearing what the carpenter and plumber tell you about the on demand water heater. The smallest one I found was the size of a metro Yellow Pages, and still put out 2 GPM in excess of 125 degrees, but I would have had to add a whole new circuit and wiring to our breaker box to make it go. The smaller the water heater, the heavier the electrical draw, and I wouldn’t want to put an gas heater under a sink!