Pesky public place plumbing

I'm talking here about airport loos mainly. This might be a girl thing, but a loo which flushed as soon as I stood up had me scared out of my wits the first time it happened. I remain traumatised, forever expecting the stupid thing to go off early. Yes, I know there is some sort of magic beam thingy controlling it all, but why should they expect me to be rational? What if I happen to want to bend down and tie up a loose shoelace or something? Whammo, we all know what would happen, don't we!

And I still don't like those taps that gush water before I even get within reach of the basin. I'm never sure that they are going to turn themselves off when I've finished washing my hands. I always get that niggling fear that with THIS set, there might, in fact, be something I am supposed to do to cut off the flow. Sure I can act cool and walk away with the thing still gushing, but what I REALLY want to do - and sometimes have, when I thought no-one was looking - is to sneak a peak back around the door to check it really has stopped, and I don't have to worry about the place flooding after I've gone.

Hot and Cold

Americans in particular seem to take a real pride in designing completely inscrutable bath and shower fittings. Let me define the baseline here. When I was growing up, "normal" bathroom plumbing meant you had a hot water tap and a cold water tap. These had handles on the top that you turned to make the water come out of a spout (usually one spout each, sometimes a combined one) at a particular pressure. How far you turned each one determined the temperature and the flow rate. Simple, ok?

Shower worked the same way as the basin - mostly it had its own taps, but if it was located over the bath, you might have just one set of taps for both shower and bath, and you would switch from one to the other by way of a little dooverlackie on the bath spout.

OK, we have moved on from that, even in Australia, and a whole range of bathroom water-delivery-thingies now exist, most of which seem designed to make you feel incompetent. But I first came across them in America, so it seems only fair to blame them!

Just in case you are not up on this scourge, here is a little guide to using your typical American bath / shower combo.

No taps in the shower

What you mostly get in the shower is a central control "thingy" (sorry to be so generic here, but they are all different) which makes water come out somewhere, at some termperature. For instance, at the "shower" end of the bath, there might be a big round chrome dial, with a paddle-shaped object or big round knob or some sort of dial in the centre of it. If you are lucky, there will be red and blue markings or "H" and "C" on it somewhere, but sometimes the letters are just etched into the chrome, which is a real treat for people who wear glasses and forget to check this out before they get in.

Anyway, the idea, as you would expect, is that you turn whatever it is to the left or right (no, hot and cold are not consistently on any particular side), to get your shower. I bet, if the water comes out, you reckon you're on easy street, right? Well the bad news is that if it is THIS easy, it means you've got one of those showers where the magic water gremlin gets to pick the water pressure for you! Your shower will be any of the following: warm but weak, scalding but too hard, icy but too hard, and sometimes, just right!

Check out the bath water spout - has it got a knob on or near it? Pulling this knob up or out USUALLY diverts the water from the bath spout to the shower which, if you are standing under the shower at the time, can be a bit of a shock, especially if you haven't got temperature thing under control yet.

Never mind, often this little knob doesn't work very well, and much of the water will continue to come out of the bath spout. Sometimes the poor little thing just isn't up to it at all and absolutely nothing comes out of the shower unless it is kept at full stretch. Just pop a toe under it for the duration. I admit it can be a bit difficult to keep your balance in this position for long, but it does make the experience just that bit more exciting.

Water in the wrong place?

Always a good idea to check where the shower head is actually pointing before you get too heavily into the water flow issues. Motel cleaners sometimes have a great sense of humour.

And before you start twiddling all the dials and knobs on the shower head, I should warn you that at least one model I've played with has a very tempting lever right where you would expect the "massage/needle" adjuster to be, which actually detaches the shower rose from the input pipe. But don't let that put you off your experiments. Why should I have all the fun?

I'm a bath person - so where's the plug?

I'm willing to accept that you might in fact be a bath person, and you are not taking this as an easy way out of avoiding working out how to operate the shower. I'll also assume that you can probably cope with those metal plugs that are permanently attached to the plug-hole. If you fool around long enough with it, you'll no doubt be able to get the thing to go pop down into place. Not really much of a challenge.

No, to add spice to the bather's experience, Americans like to put in invisible plugs. You can tell you've got an invisible plug (as opposed to just a missing one) if you have an extra little lever hiding somewhere down there in the vicinity of the bath, that isn't the one that diverts the water into the shower. This other little lever is the plug.

Yup, if you pull or push it in some direction or other, and turn on the taps, then assuming it is all working, you will hear a succession of little mechanical noises, which means some hidden apparatus down the pipe somewhere will stop the water leaking out of the bath. Trust me, if you run the water long enough, you'll see it stop going down the hole, and start coming back up to fill the bath again.

Tip: For those of you who might be wondering what IS the right level to get the bath water before you turn the turbo jets on in your spa bath: it is when they are covered, NOT when the water is half way up the jet hole. But if you are going to experiment with this just to check it out, at least try to position the jets so that one does not produce a stream that strikes you in the eyes. Having one pointing out the door is also not a good idea.