In England, even now, people almost never have good water pressure. I remember being amazed when I bought my first flat in the UK to find that, though the flat was built in 1988, that, like most other places I'd lived in to that point, hot water was made by heating (electrically) cold water that was stored in a large, un-pressurised bucket stored in the ceiling. This means that, like every where else I'd lived, that hot water pressure consisted of a dribble driven simply by gravity from the ceiling, and that, consequently, one could never adjust temperature in the shower, having either scalding hot or freezing cold water, and nothing in between.
Things are generally better on continental Europe (including the former Yugoslavia), but as we slowly begin to renovate a house here, I've been noticing some of the oddities of house-building here. Namely the boiler-in-the-bathtub phenomenon. Having a boiler in the bathtub seems to be about as consistently ex-Yugo as the insistence on wearing slippers in the house (watch out for Brain fever) or the universal paranoia about drafts causing serious illness even in hot weather (ditto). In both Serbia and Croatia it often seems the norm to place the houses boiler above the bathtub. And more often than not this comes at the expense of any ledge to put soap on, or (more seriously) anywhere to fix the shower head to the wall, meaning that showers consist often of a rubber hose with a shower head that one has to hold, while always avoiding contact with the boiler next to you.
And its funny that people rationalise this with the same pseudo-logic that English people use about the water pressure. Where English people might say that European hot-water is too strongly pressurised (one friend told me that showers in Germany actually hurt), at least one Croatian builder told me that if the boiler was anywhere else, it might take 20 minutes for the hot water to move through the pipes. And just like in Enland, there is no counter argument along the lines of "but I've seen it work better in other places, honestly".
Still, if I had to choose, a boiler in the bathtub beats never having proper water pressure, but I'll fight tooth and nail to get that damned boiler put somewhere else.
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4 comments:
Hello! I very much enjoyed your most recent posting, because as an American who just returned from backpacking across Europe and then a four-month stay in Poland, I recall exactly the situation you describe. It was very bizarre for us to be able to see our water heater in our bathroom, and we could never quite get used to the weak amount of pressure. (However, it was better in Poland than England, in our opinion...)
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Thanks for the comments. Always glad that I'm not alone. Anyway, you can contact me on: robertbrucerussell@gmail.com
Hello there! The hot water in the boiler gets the pressure from the cold water inlet into the boiler. The cold water enters the boiler and "pushes" the hold water out, so the actual position of the boiler does not matter at all. It is mounted above the bathtub only because of lack of space in the bath, and... bad building habits :)
Lo there!
As Fric said, boilers go above bathtubs because lack of space. In bigger bathrooms, boilers are positioned above smth else, like washing machine, in the other bathroom corner.
As for "no-where-to-fix" shower head, it's too a part of building/constructing habits. I guess people thought rotating shower head arround you, while taking a shower is more practical than rotating yourself, tho you can't use both hands for rubbing yourself etc. Then again, its something about taking shower habits too. In my flat, I have that "fixing shower head thingy", but I never use it, cause I learned taking shower the ex-yu way and thats it :)
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