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The mystery of the UK faucets

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vison
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Thu 11 Mar , 2010 3:05 am
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Hot water tanks breed germs? Jeez. Not many germs at 140 degrees, peeps.

The newest and most efficient sort of hot water system is "on demand", where the water is heated as you use it. This is SOP in Japan, for instance.

In fancy new houses, this is the system they install. No hot water tank. It's a great system, but expensive to install. Once up and running, it's cheaper in the long run than a hot water tank.

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*E*V*E*N*S*T*A*R*
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Thu 11 Mar , 2010 4:20 am
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I didn't know this was common. :Q I never saw a two tap sink until five years ago at my grandma's neighbor's place in Toronto. I just ran my hands between both streams really quickly in hopes that my neurons would interpret a middle temperature, rather than either extreme. :blackeye:

Only seen a few of them since, all in Canada, but their existence sounds useless. :pout:




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nienna
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Thu 11 Mar , 2010 8:42 am
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Okay...I've resisted for so long...here's my two cents worth:

It's so wasteful to let the water run straight down the drain like that ... though it is good if you just want to splash your hands quickly. In our own homes we would happily run a basin of water to wash hands, but of course, wouldn't do that in public rest rooms!!! More and more public rest rooms seem to be changing over to wall-mounted, automated units where you put your hands into the opening and the soap, then warm water, and then warm air is discharged at intervals.

I'm not a plumber, but I understand that the water storage and heating systems used in British homes can also make it inconvenient and/or dangerous to use mixers. The danger is something to do with the hot and cold water being supplied at different pressures, which could mean that water not suitable for drinking could get into your drinking water supply. And the inconvenience is because mixer taps require higher pressures than are possible with the British immersion tanks/Victorian plumbing. You would have to have the entire water heating system changed just for the sake of having new taps, when the old ones work fine and appeal to many for their traditional looks. I do have a mixer tap in my kitchen, but the hot water pressure is very weak compared to the cold.

Apparently the separate hot and cold taps are in fact a feature of the building codes. It seems that even the modest pressure increase from a water heater can overwhelm the pitiful mains pressure, and thus force potentially contaminated water back into the public supply. Thus hot and cold water taps must remain separate -- can't be too careful, one understands.

But if you want further enlightenment on both sides of the argument...

http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/mhillebrandt ... arities_i/

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elfshadow
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Thu 11 Mar , 2010 1:46 pm
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nienna wrote:
It's so wasteful to let the water run straight down the drain like that ... though it is good if you just want to splash your hands quickly. In our own homes we would happily run a basin of water to wash hands, but of course, wouldn't do that in public rest rooms!!! More and more public rest rooms seem to be changing over to wall-mounted, automated units where you put your hands into the opening and the soap, then warm water, and then warm air is discharged at intervals
I guess I just don't see how running the faucet to wash your hands is more wasteful than filling the sink to do so. :scratch: Don't you have to fill the sink full enough to be able to dip your hands into it? That takes plenty of water too.


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Jude
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Thu 11 Mar , 2010 1:51 pm
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An easy way to find out - close the drain next time you wash your hands under the running faucet. Is the sink filled when you finish?

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nienna
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Thu 11 Mar , 2010 2:05 pm
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Well, we don't bother filling the sink when we wash our hands after using the bathroom. Tbh, the water doesn't usually come out scalding hot straight away, so it's really not a problem to just run them under the "hot" tap. We would fill the sink in the bathroom if we were having a "strip wash" instead of a shower, and doing arms, face, neck, etc!! That's the way people had to wash before showers were invented, and not everyone ran a bath everyday...

It is just a case of what you're used to, isn't it? I never even thought about it before, though if I spent 6 months in another country and got used to mixer taps maybe I would be more bothered when I came home!

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MariaHobbit
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Thu 11 Mar , 2010 6:57 pm
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We call a "strip wash" a sponge bath, nienna. :)
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More and more public rest rooms seem to be changing over to wall-mounted, automated units where you put your hands into the opening and the soap, then warm water, and then warm air is discharged at intervals.
Ack! I'd hate that. My skin can't stand soap very often, so I only use soap when there's something obnoxious and oily on my skin. If I used soap every time I rinsed my hands, my hands would be cracked and bleeding!

I never wait for the tap to warm up before rinsing my hands, so the mixer valve really doesn't matter for hand washing for me. A quick splash and I'm done. Germs don't worry me much. My cells outnumber them, and are mean fighters! ;)

Most people don't leave their water heaters turned up all the way to 140, vison. Up until last year I kept ours at 125 all the time as an energy saver. When I was washing raw wool fleeces last year, I turned the heater all the way up (and forgot to turn it back) , so I assume it's still near 140 now.

We put in an on demand electric water heater in series with our tank water heater years ago, with the thought of using the tank water heater to heat the water part way, and then the on demand heater to heat it up the rest of the way. It didn't work very well. The on demand heater couldn't heat up the water fast enough to keep up with the demand for one shower, and plus, when we got our first electric bill after the experiment started-- our bill was significantly higher.

So, we eventually turned off the on demand heater and it still sits in series with the tank heater- useless. :shrug: It was quite a waste of time and money.

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Riverthalos
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Thu 11 Mar , 2010 7:05 pm
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MariaHobbit wrote:
My cells outnumber them, and are mean fighters! ;)
Actually, the numbers game favors the germs - your body has ten bacterial cells for every human cell. But your cells are indeed mean fighters. They are also much bigger than the bacterial cells, so by weight you're still human.

Excessive washing with soap wrecks havoc upon my skin. It doesn't help that it's so bloody dry here. This is less true now than it was when I was a grad student (nature of the job changed) but I have to wash my hands fairly frequently and as a result my knuckles will crack and bleed. Not. Fun. It is nice to not be working with toxic stuff on a daily basis.

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MariaHobbit
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Thu 11 Mar , 2010 7:21 pm
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My hands are still recovering from that 3 days last week when my dog was recovering from her near death experience and I had to wash her bedding several times a day because she couldn't hold her bladder. Yes, I do wash my hands with soap if I get urine on them! I just can't help it! Even though I KNOW it's probably plenty water soluble and rinsing should be OK, I still use soap. After a single day of that treatment, my hands started popping up little splinters of skin all over. I first noticed this when working with wool. The fibers were catching in odd places all over my hands! They were like hang nails, but nowhere near my finger nails. After that, I started putting on rubber gloves each time I handled the bedding, so things didn't progress from there.

Dish pan hands are no minor thing for me. I have to use rubber gloves to wash dishes with.

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Jude
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Thu 11 Mar , 2010 7:30 pm
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What happens if you use a liquid soap, like they have at Lush or The Body Shop?

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MariaHobbit
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Thu 11 Mar , 2010 7:52 pm
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I don't experiment anymore. A surfactant is a surfactant. Dressing it up with cute smells and colors isn't going to change its basic function of dissolving oils and making them wash away easier, carrying dirt with it. My skin can't stand up to much of that.

Last edited by MariaHobbit on Thu 11 Mar , 2010 7:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Ara-anna
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Thu 11 Mar , 2010 7:52 pm
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I'm like Maria I can't use harsh soaps, they have to be mild, this includes laundry soap.

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*E*V*E*N*S*T*A*R*
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Thu 11 Mar , 2010 9:22 pm
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Wait, so washing your hands with water really is the same as washing with soap? I hate dry skin, but I'd rather be clean than soft. :neutral: I was trying to dust around the computer earlier this week and must have inhaled the wrong mite or something, because I've been stuffed up and sore ever since. Even though I'd been using hand sanitizer, maybe I should have worn a mask too.




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MariaHobbit
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Thu 11 Mar , 2010 10:00 pm
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It's not an issue of *soft*, pretty skin. It's choosing to whether to have fairly normal skin on the hands vs sore, cracked and bleeding skin. I wouldn't care about the soap issue if my hands were hard and calloused through using soap- it's the pain that gets to me and the roughness that snags on soft things. Sometimes I literally have to take sandpaper to damaged bits of my skin so I can smooth it down enough to handle silk or soft wool fibers.

To me, a nebulous *clean* state is not worth the damage to my hands. I haven't been sick in years, so the whole germ issue doesn't mean much to me.

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vison
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Thu 11 Mar , 2010 11:59 pm
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I have big lumpy and ugly hands, but soap bothers me a little. Depends on the soaps.

So you guys whose hands act up so badly, how do you manage washing your hair? :scratch:

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Riverthalos
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Fri 12 Mar , 2010 12:54 am
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I think shampoos in general are gentler than handsoaps.

I wash my hands with soap whenever I wash them. I prefer a nice liquid handsoap but if I've got something incredibly greasy going on, I use dish soap or Ajax or, if I had to fix my bike on the way to work, the incredibly strong lab dish detergent. No, it is not nice. This treatment must be chased with copious rinsing. But I'll accept dryness. It's rashes I can't stand.

Most labs, because of the handwashing issue, will keep a bottle of lotion next to the bottle of handsoap. The trouble is, the lotion in my former lab, and every other lab I've worked in actually, tended/tends to be whatever we pulled out of the stockroom and on my dried out hands it stings and burns. So I either forgo lotion or pack my own. Neutrogena's Norwegian formula is the bomb. My dad recommends cow tit cream but Ive never bothered to do the legwork to find it.

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elfshadow
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Fri 12 Mar , 2010 2:04 am
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Cetaphil is the best remedy to strong soaps and lotions, in my experience. I use Cetaphil face lotion with SPF 15 and it's the best moisturizer I've ever used. I would never switch. I'm not sure how it's made, but it doesn't use normal soap. Maria, you've probably already tried Cetaphil as a cleanser, but if you haven't, I would highly recommend it!


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vison
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Fri 12 Mar , 2010 2:52 am
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You can keep a bottle of shampoo by your sink to wash your hands. It's just soap, no different than any other soap. An interesting and informative read: "Don't Go To the Cosmetics Counter Without Me" will fill you in. ;)

I use Cetaphil on my face now and again, but only if I have makeup to remove. Not very often any more. Otherwise I use plain water and a washcloth.

But I wash my hands, as a rule, with Ivory bar soap.

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*E*V*E*N*S*T*A*R*
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Fri 12 Mar , 2010 3:06 am
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MariaHobbit wrote:
It's not an issue of *soft*, pretty skin. It's choosing to whether to have fairly normal skin on the hands vs sore, cracked and bleeding skin.
Isn't that what I said? Soap = tough on skin. But also cleanliness. So I try to deal as best I can.
Quote:
I haven't been sick in years, so the whole germ issue doesn't mean much to me.
This is the stuff of nightmares for a hypochondriac. :uhoh:




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Holbytla
Post subject: Re: The mystery of the UK faucets
Posted: Fri 12 Mar , 2010 7:53 pm
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I grew up in a house with a two tap sink in the bathroom.
If you had really dirty hands that needed scrubbing, it was a game of burning hot then freezing or using the sink itself as a basin.
I generally got the towels all dirty and that would make my bum sore.

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