From Drip to Rush

[csberry]

I was really annoyed Wednesday when I found out that HSV Utilities was going to shut off the water in our n'hood from 8am-2pm. Since I tend to work from home and JD's home w/ the kids, it was probably more inconvenient for us than most other households on the street. We filled both tubs with water and put a couple of pitches of filtered water in the fridge.

A little after noon, I flushed a toilet and water was coming out of the feed. Yay! The work was done early! I went to the kitchen and started the washing machine filling so I could do a load. WHOOSH, came the water. More water than usual was rushing into the washing machine. JD then comes and declares that the toilet she just flushed was already filled.

One of my biggest pet peeves about my house has been the low water pressure. My hopes of finding a way of fixing something around the house was spoiled as I learned my n'bors also suffered from low pressure. Let me define low pressure:

* Toilets take minutes to refill
* Only one water sprinkler can run at a time. If you hook one up in the backyard to the faucet back there and one to the faucet in the back...there is just enough pressure for them to slowly spray. It has been impossible to daisy chain or T-off sprinklers so I run two from the same faucet.
* Filling the bath 4" so the kids to take a bath takes about 15-20 minutes.
* More than half of the shower heads we've installed in the house wouldn't work because the pressure was too low.

But all of that has changed with whatever work the city utility did. The shower head in the master bath has a dial that varies the flow (open to closed). The only use we've had for this dial was to temporarily turn off the shower head so we could swap getting-in/out of the shower. The water is now coming out of the shower head so strong that she's turned that dial closed a little bit because the shower was stinging.

The big thing that made JD and I giggly was last evening. JD hopped in the shower, I started the tub filling for the kids' bath, and then I decided to start the washing machine. Even with the tub and washing machine going, JD had plenty of pressure. Previously, either the shower or tub would have slowed to a trickle.

*SQUEE!*

Now, let's just look at the water bill next month and try to not have a heart attack. :)

Comments

[wc-helmets.livejournal.com]

[theverticalbar.livejournal.com]

haha my thought exactly!

[csberry.livejournal.com]

Heh. At least I can sleep well knowing a Kenny Rogers Roasters isn't going to move in across the street from me.

[spiderandi.livejournal.com]

WOO! Definitely squee-worthy!

[chris21718.livejournal.com]

If your pressure is now great, and your shower heads don't have the flow restrictor in them, you might want to change them out for ones that do. I thought I'd hate the idea of a flow restrictor in the shower head, but it's actually wonderful. Enough water comes out to bathe without a huge amount of waste, and I never use all of the hot water from the water heater since not as much is coming out. It also keeps water usage down, even for a long shower.

[csberry.livejournal.com]

Thanks for reminding me. The master bath shower head is a fairly recent purchase and, for some reason, when I removed the flow restrictor, I kept it. When I first hooked this up to the pipe, nothing came out when I switched the water to the shower. Nothing. Not even a few drips. With the hard water, I'm still a bit iffy about putting the restrictor back in rather than have the valve set at 2/3 open. I can't help but think the hard water is going to clog up the filter in no time flat.