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06/08/2004: "Shower Plumbing"

A pet peave is when you adjust the shower temperature and, 1.5 seconds late, the temperature changes. It doesn't have to be that way.

Normally, two pipes feed the shower control(s). The hot and cold water merge in the proportion dictated by the user and one pipe carries the warm water to the shower head. But if there were two controls, two pipes cold carry the hot and cold water to the shower head where it could merge and cleanse on the user.

Users diddle the shower knobs to change the warm water temperature. The advantage of this second method is that instead of having to wait 1.5 seconds for the newly mixed water to reach the user from the controls, the user would only have to wait .5 seconds.

Neither two feet of pipe nor one second of time on a daily basis are a great cost, but, relatively speaking, I'd rather pay for the pipe once and enjoy the luxury of hyper reactive controls for the rest of my life.