Fuck mixer taps
!markdown
We've recently moved house, to a refitted Victorian tenement flat in Leith.
We're renting it from a lovely couple from Continental Europe, and this I
suspect is the reason for one of the few things that annoy me about the place:
that every sink in the flat is fitted with [mixer
taps](http://www.screwfix.com/c/bathrooms-kitchens/kitchen-mixer-taps/cat4650002).
Ordinarily this is merely a mild irritant, but occasionally (as happened this
morning), they drive me into a towering rage. Let me explain...
I'd taken out the contents of the food recycling bin, but a foul-smelling brown
gunge still coated the insides of the bin itself. I was therefore filling the
bin with a mix of bleach and hot water, the latter from the bathroom sink. The
sink was too small to fit the bin in, so I was filling a pint cup with hot
water from the sink and tipping it into the bin. Fortunately it's quite a small
bin. My attention lapsed for a moment, though, and the water overflowed, mildly
but painfully scalding my left hand. No problem: I could keep filling the hot
water with my right hand, while holding my left hand under the cold tap for as
long as it took to cool down. Except, oh, wait, mixer taps. Dammit. So I had to
turn off the hot tap, put down the cup, turn on the cold tap, and wait
uselessly for however long it took for my hand to stop hurting.
Except I had forgotten about the *other* problem with mixer taps: hysteresis.
When you turn off the hot water in a mixer tap system, you see, you don't reset
the tap to a safe state: a slug of hot water remains in the pipe, lying in wait
for the unwary. And so when I put my sore hand under the tap and turned on the
cold water, I was instead treated to a high-pressure dose of painfully hot water
onto the already painful area.
And then a few minutes later, while mentally composing this blog post and
muttering curses against the inventors of mixer taps and their descendents,
yea, unto the seventh generation, the **same thing happened to me again**.
In conclusion: fuck mixer taps. Fuck them right in their stupid single
non-parallelisable pain-causing water outlets.
This post is dedicated to
elmyra, who labours
under the misapprehension that mixer taps are not only a superior
technology, but so obviously a superior technology that the only possible reason they
have not been universally adopted can be ignorance of their existence.
This entry was originally posted at http://pozorvlak.dreamwidth.org/177634.html. Please comment wherever and however is most convenient for you!
We've recently moved house, to a refitted Victorian tenement flat in Leith.
We're renting it from a lovely couple from Continental Europe, and this I
suspect is the reason for one of the few things that annoy me about the place:
that every sink in the flat is fitted with [mixer
taps](http://www.screwfix.com/c/bathrooms-kitchens/kitchen-mixer-taps/cat4650002).
Ordinarily this is merely a mild irritant, but occasionally (as happened this
morning), they drive me into a towering rage. Let me explain...
I'd taken out the contents of the food recycling bin, but a foul-smelling brown
gunge still coated the insides of the bin itself. I was therefore filling the
bin with a mix of bleach and hot water, the latter from the bathroom sink. The
sink was too small to fit the bin in, so I was filling a pint cup with hot
water from the sink and tipping it into the bin. Fortunately it's quite a small
bin. My attention lapsed for a moment, though, and the water overflowed, mildly
but painfully scalding my left hand. No problem: I could keep filling the hot
water with my right hand, while holding my left hand under the cold tap for as
long as it took to cool down. Except, oh, wait, mixer taps. Dammit. So I had to
turn off the hot tap, put down the cup, turn on the cold tap, and wait
uselessly for however long it took for my hand to stop hurting.
Except I had forgotten about the *other* problem with mixer taps: hysteresis.
When you turn off the hot water in a mixer tap system, you see, you don't reset
the tap to a safe state: a slug of hot water remains in the pipe, lying in wait
for the unwary. And so when I put my sore hand under the tap and turned on the
cold water, I was instead treated to a high-pressure dose of painfully hot water
onto the already painful area.
And then a few minutes later, while mentally composing this blog post and
muttering curses against the inventors of mixer taps and their descendents,
yea, unto the seventh generation, the **same thing happened to me again**.
In conclusion: fuck mixer taps. Fuck them right in their stupid single
non-parallelisable pain-causing water outlets.
This post is dedicated to
elmyra, who labours
under the misapprehension that mixer taps are not only a superior
technology, but so obviously a superior technology that the only possible reason they
have not been universally adopted can be ignorance of their existence.
This entry was originally posted at http://pozorvlak.dreamwidth.org/177634.html. Please comment wherever and however is most convenient for you!