sniffnoy | Showerheads

Our house has two showers. One of them (the lower one) has two knobs: hot water, and cold water. We won't be concerned with the lower one here.

Until recently, the upper one had only one knob. The way it works, in theory, is that how far you pull it out controls the amount of water, while which way it is turned controls the temperature. Clockwise for cold, counter for hot. The amount control works rather well, the temperature is rather fickle. You can generally be sure that leaving it in one place will cause the temperature to remain constant - assuming, of course, that nothing else is using a lot of water, in which case you will quickly find that while turning it in the opposite direction might have a temporary effect, no matter how much you do so, it will quickly revert to either incredibly hot or incredibly cold, depending - but if you turn the knob at all, the result is little better than random chance. It seems that it is constantly recalibrating itself, and whenever you happen to take it out of its constancy is when the new calibration takes effect. The delay between turning the knob and the water responding didn't help much either. Still, I used it anyway; messing with how much hot and how much cold was just not something I wanted to do.

Recently we got the upper shower fixed up. It still has a separate amount and temperature control, which is rather nice - and in fact now the temperature control actually *works* - but there's two big problems.

Firstly, the showerhead.

The old showerhead was a fixed one; it pointed to the near end (i.e. near the controls). Now, naturally enough, you could take all the time you wanted getting the temperature just right as the water came out the bath faucet, but as soon as you switched it to shower mode, the temperature would immediately make an unpredictable jump. That is still the case. With the old showerhead, then, what I would do is, as soon as I put it in shower mode, I would immediately step away to the far end so as not to get frozen/burned with randomly temperatured water. The new showerhead is a movable one. This would normally be a good thing, except that somebody *keeps pointing it to the far end*. So a lot of the time I forget to check where it's pointing, turn the shower on, step away to the far end - and get hit anyway. Not very nice.

The second problem is the duct tape. Water tends to leak out of the near corner of the shower, getting all over the floor. My parents apparently learned how to deal with this problem long ago, but it took me quite a while before I finally found that I could get the curtain to stick to the wall (since they were both wet), thus preventing any water from getting through. Now... there is duct tape there. It holds down the black material that covers where the tiles once were. And the curtain won't stick to it. So the water leaks out. Somehow my parents again have avoided this problem. My father, therefore, has mandated that I now shower at the far end. Oy oy oy... (I suppose *that's* how they avoid the problem.)

Thankfully, soon there will be tiles again.

-Sniffnoy