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ventaA question for those of a scientific turn of mind.
I live in Oxford which, as many of you know, is a hard water area. Our kettle needs regular de-scaling, as it quickly fills up with concrete-y white deposits. I'm sure the iron would too, if we ever used it.
Recently, the shower has been communicating to me that it needs de-scaling; it does this by running extremely hot. This isn't as daft as it sounds: scale lowers the water throughput, and thus the shower is heating much less water than it thinks it is, the net result being that it heats it too much (at least, that's my understanding).
It's always a fight to dismantle the showerhead, but when one does the deposits found therein always turn out to be a virulent shade of jade-green. Why ? Is it in fact not scale, but some mysterious by-product of a disintegrating copper water tank ?
And for those who are not of a scientific turn of mind: what do they call cider in America ?
I live in Oxford which, as many of you know, is a hard water area. Our kettle needs regular de-scaling, as it quickly fills up with concrete-y white deposits. I'm sure the iron would too, if we ever used it.
Recently, the shower has been communicating to me that it needs de-scaling; it does this by running extremely hot. This isn't as daft as it sounds: scale lowers the water throughput, and thus the shower is heating much less water than it thinks it is, the net result being that it heats it too much (at least, that's my understanding).
It's always a fight to dismantle the showerhead, but when one does the deposits found therein always turn out to be a virulent shade of jade-green. Why ? Is it in fact not scale, but some mysterious by-product of a disintegrating copper water tank ?
And for those who are not of a scientific turn of mind: what do they call cider in America ?
no subject
Date: 2008-05-14 12:51 pm (UTC)Assuming it's the usual kind of electric shower, they generally have two user controls: one to set the amount of heating (typically 'none, ie cold', 'some' and 'lots'), and one to adjust how fast to let the water out. The slower you let the water out, the longer it spends around the heating elements, so the hotter it ends up. This is why the flow rate control is typically labelled as a temperature control, although this is not what it actually does. So a bunged up shower head has the same effect as turning the flow rate down, and the water's hotter.
I have occasionally seen showers where not only is the flow rate control labelled as a temperature control, but the temperature control is labelled as flow rate...