I would just like to announce that I finished a project and every single thing went perfectly.
Had a sink in the workshop which was spitting rust from some unreachable internal component, so bought a replacement pedestal faucet. Except the connector hoses were too short to reach the stop valves;, so I elected to change everything, run the plumbing behind the wall up higher and hide the valves on the other side of the wall in the HVAC room.
I can’t remember how long it’s been since I fished holes for pipes through two drywalls with insulation between, cut and rejiggered the piping without a single leak, made the connections, set the faucet in place and turned it all on and voila! Even plugged the old holes and have some of the original paint from that bathroom to cover. Sweet.
So, except for the stock market, maybe, 2023 is off to a good start.
Good work !
I finished up 1st floor bathroom, new ceiling, floor, sink, vanity,toilet, and paint, turned out good !
Getting going on a spare bedroom, it’ll be new ceiling, floor, paint, and design access to the plumbing of the adjacent 1st floor bathroom plumbing. ( so obviously the adjacent wall is stripped to the studs ).
It’s good to have projects to keep occupied !
When I purchased this house in 1997, being an engineer, I was kind of a PITA and made sure my inspector inspected EVERYTHING properly. He even had a newfangled “ray gun” device that measured water temperature coming out of the tap. Sure enough, I had him measure all the taps and all the baths/showers. And he did measure, perhaps with a little bit of rolling eyes, and he did include those measurements in his report. The seller fixed a few small things, and gave me a credit for a few small other things, and I purchased the house. It was just me and my [pregnant] wife at the time, so we only used the master bathroom shower. A few months later, we had guests and they used the family room shower and reported … no cold water being mixed in the shower valve!!! It was true, the valve was apparently messed up, and was entirely behind tile. I tried to get at it from the other side drywall, but couldn’t due to an obstruction. So we didn’t use that shower for a number of years until some other renovation project.
The inspector had dutifully measured the hot water coming out, but assumed that the cold would naturally be as cold as incoming water usually is around here.
Here’s another amazing hot water story. At least I’m amazed.
Behind the fridge is a recessed pocket with the “ice maker” water supply valve.
The water from that spigot, is HOT. The hot water heater is about 0.5m from the spigot, on the other side of a wall, so when the water flows, it gets HOT really QUICKLY.
I’m told that a few other apartments are similarly plumbed.
Is this an error, or is there some reasonable reason to input hot water to the ice maker?
With certainty for any house who water source is surface water getting water from the hot water side will produce noticeably clearer ice cubes. Air is amazingly soluble in water. Air is much less soluble in hot water and water just above the freezing point.
You can easily see this by putting a pan of tap water in a pan on the stove. Turn the heat on and you will see small bubbles forming at the bottom of the pan. If you measure the temperature when you start seeing bubbles, you will soon see you are no where near boiling.
If you need further convincing, let the pan cool repeat the heating and note the temperature at which previously boiled water starts to show bubbles while being heated.
I only point out that you are paying for the energy to heat the water, then paying for it again as the heat disperses in your freezer and eventually freezes. So you get clearer ice cubes.
There is a myth that hot water freezes faster than cold, but it ain’t so.
A trendy item lately has been a gizmo to make clear ice cubes, basically it’s a small hard sided cooler with an ice cube tray that nestles in the top. You fill the bottom with hot water and put it in the freezer. Because the water in the tray freezes more slowly the cubes come out clear, as the gasses have time to migrate out of the water in the upper tray. So for a mere $60 and a cubic foot of freezer space and additional energy cost, you too can have clear ice cubes.
I’ve always run hot water in the kitchen sink* before running the dishwasher. I read somewhere that the dishwasher heats the water anyway, so that is really not necessary. Which makes me wonder… why not hook the dishwasher up to the cold water.
*(It takes running the hot water for a minute and a quarter to get it to full hot. I just timed it again and confirmed what I thought I remembered.)
Yes there is a sensor, but the heating is done by a resistance coil (usually about the size of a basketball hoop at the bottom of the tub) which is an expensive way to heat water. That said, most electric water heaters use resistance heating, so it probably is a wash, pardon the pun. If your water is heated by gas, heat pump or other (more efficient) means then it’s expensive to have the DW do it.
[I have a small Point-Of-Use HW heater under the kitchen sink so we get hot water immediately on opening the tap; it also feeds the dishwasher. Connected to the hot water line it pulls in that “cold water” that you run down the drain but produces hot water immediately. {Technical absurdity: that cools the water in the POU, but I run the regular HW heater at a slightly higher temperature so it probably somewhat balances by the time all the water washes through}. I have never put a Kil-A-Watt meter on the POU, I’m sure it uses some energy but I really have no idea how it balances out.]
Recall that your dishwasher runs in cycles, so even though you run the water to “hot” before you start, it probably cools in the line by the time it gets to the rinse cycle, and likely goes through another “heat” cycle with the resistance heat loop.
Final point: our dishwasher has a “heat dry” setting (on by default) which also uses the resistance coil (which is why you shouldn’t put plastics on the lower level). We have to manually turn off the “heat dry” setting with every load; we can wait for “drip dry”, it’s not a big deal.
Thanks @GWPotter . Boiling the water does de-gas it, and is indeed a reasonable reason.
I knew about that, but had never run across the ice maker connected to hot water supply, and had never even thought about it.
I asked the owner/maintenance guy here at the apartments, and all the apartments are plumbed with hot water to the ice maker water supply spigot.
The maintenance guy is perplexed, too.
These apartments were originally built in the early 1980s to be condos, but were eventually developed into apartments.
As condos, perhaps they were designed with “luxury” touches, and “clear, clean, pretty” ice might be considered a luxury?
A Google suggests that a refrigerator ice maker uses only one liter or less of water per “freeze” event, therefore the water entering the actual freeze tray is most likely room temperature.
Further, a number of responses to the same question, back in 2014, were less than believable
Hot water freezes faster than cold water. .
Hot water supply has more “crud” in it due to leaching from solder, and/or cruddy hot water tank sediment.
One guy had the same reasoning that boiled, or heated water, had less gas (and fewer particulates) and was therefore cleaner, more clear than water that had not been boiled.
For those filling ice cube trays from the tap there is the added factor of the aerator that adds air to the water as it exits the faucet.
I suspect that as an alternative to boiling, putting water in a partially filled sealed container and using a vacuum pump to remove air would get de-gas the water to at least some extent. Unfortunately my only vacuum pump is specialized to emptying bags or I might experiment.
Why not just leave a container of water, without a cover, on the countertop overnight? I do this with my coffee pot water for the next morning’s coffee. I find that the chlorine from the city water off gasses and the water tastes much better, just as if I had passed the water through my Britta filter.
I apparently have a very sensitive nose and taste buds. I can smell the chlorine coming out of the tap, as can one of our kids, but DH and the other kid don’t notice. One thing I do before buying a house is taste the water.
Good idea. I’ve been living in houses with wells for forty years, and while the water is fine at the current house, I think it might have been better from my last one. This house has two water softeners, which is new to me. Of course chlorine is not an issue for wells.
True, but many other taste issues can be, depending on the minerals surrounding the water. Our riverfront neighborhood can have issues with sulfur smells in the water. Our place is minimally impacted while others have quite the rotten egg smell!
