One Armed Bandits

Maybe we should rename faucets like the one in the picture “One Armed Bandits.” Think about it. Every time you turn on the faucet to wash off your hands or rinse out a glass before putting it in the dishwasher, you are drawing hot water from your water heater half way across the house. That hot water travels ten or twenty feet or all the way to your faucet and mixes with the cold water because all such faucets are designed so that the arm normally sits in the center, mixing 50% hot and 50% cold water. People don’t even think about just swinging it to the cold water side when they do something quick like washing their hands off. They just lift it straight up.

I just did a quick unscientific test. I washed my hands in the kitchen and measured how much water I used: 2 quarts. That means everytime you wash your hands you waste the energy to heat 1 quart of water. Multiply that by however many million such faucets there are installed in kitchens or bathrooms all over the world, then by the number of times people turn on the water when they don’t need hot water. I’ll leave it to someone else who has the time to convert that to wasted BTUs but it is a whole trainload of wasted energy every day.

The solution to this does not necessarily mean going back to the old style faucet with a hot and cold valves side by side like you commonly see in bathrooms. A better solution that would be more popular is to design a faucet where the most natural way to turn it on is when it is drawing only cold water. Some newer style single hole faucets have two valves, one for the pressure and one for the temperature. Some of them are very awkward, but some are excellent.

I offer this as a whole new episode of “Living With Ed.”