botrash.com/ http://blog.wombatforums.com.au/2015/10/08/dont-put-coffee-pot-on-cold-taps/#commentsMon, 08 Oct 2018 04:38:43 +0000http://blog.wombatforums.com.au/?p=3861I’m aware I write a lot about our home here at Wombat Central, but as an architect myself I feel like sharing. Today, the topic is a familiar one but the advice is certainly not! A little while back I got a call from a customer who lives in a very cold part of Western Australia – about as cold as you can get, where you can freeze your arse off waiting for the next day to come. We got chatting and her question was: what is the best place to put the tap water tap at the back of the house? Obviously we said the hot water cylinder if they have it, because it is plumbed in and that’s where the hot water is coming from. We also explained that they could have the tap on the cold water pipe for shower/bath, but it wouldn’t be particularly good practice – the hot water at least keeps the water in the pipes warm and this is how the radiators in the house stay warm. The best course of action was to run some hot water into the cold water pipe, just for a few minutes every morning until they were warm, then they would use cold for showers/baths and they were warm all day. So that is what we did and this went fine. But to find that a coffee pot and hot water kettle both draw water from the cold water tap didn’t seem very logical to me so I asked if I could come over to look at it. There was no answer, so my next call was to the plumbers to ask them what the heck was going on and where should they put the coffee pot and hot water kettle? They told me “If you put the coffee pot on that cold water tap the water will go cold!” Now this made sense to me. Why? Because the cold water tap is connected to the cold water pipe and when you put hot water into the cold water pipe the cold water will turn cold – duh. I asked how would the plumbers feel if we put an electric kettle on the cold water tap? The answer was the same, it will cool down and this isn’t going to be good practice. I know this from experience, I’ve done it to my own house, because the place we live in is also very cold and has hot water taken straight from the ground but a lot of plumbing in place to keep the temperature. As soon as we put a kettle of boiling water on the cold water tap we turned it off because it was freezing! So this seemed logical to me.