The night before last I slept in the new house, and with Vicki away there hasn’t been any cooking or dish washing going on, so this morning’s shower was probably the first time anybody but Laura has used the hot water since the engineer’s inspection on Tuesday. And this morning I discovered that the water in the tank was stone cold – the pilot light was out. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the pilot light went out because of something the inspector did. I don’t know if Laura had had any hot water during the last couple of days – this wouldn’t be the first time where something wasn’t working right but she never bothered to tell anybody in a position to fix it – or if the tank just cooled down overnight.
I’ve got to say, though, that crawling around on my hands and knees lighting the pilot light, and then taking a sponge bath with tepid water, is not my favourite way to start the day.
Nothing makes me more unhappy faster then not being able to take a hot shower. I don’t mind getting dirty – I often spend my weekends covered in airplane grease and oil and such – but when the times comes to get clean, I want to be clean.
My SO lives in an cheap, crummy apartment complex near the airport. For the last nearly 2 years, they’ve had a problem with the water pressure – no matter what temp you set it to, every minute or two it will cycle from scaldingly hot to freezing cold, then back. You can sort of keep it at a constant temp if you continuously flush the toilet (his solution) or remove the water restrictor from the shower head (my solution). Sometimes that isn’t enough.
Nothing ruins my Saturday night like getting scalded as I’m trying to wash my hair…or worse, getting covered in soap, then finding out the cycle is stuck on “scalding”, having to turn the shower off while trying not to fall (because, of course, everything is soapy and slippery), then start the whole process over…
In a nutshell? I understand. 🙂
I lived in an apartment in Toronto that had such low water pressure in the hot line that if you had the cold on and turned on some hot, the flow volume actually decreased. In order to have a shower, you’d turn the hot tap full on, and then try to move the cold tap just a tiny bit, on the order of a millimeter or so. Very frustrating.
Check your thermocouple. They crap out every five years or so, but they are cheap and easy to replace.
It’s remarkable that this minor bit of physics keeps half the gas appliances in the world running.
Ph.