Hot Water
I mentioned in my independence days post that relighting the hot water heater was my new skill. And in an earlier post I wrote about turning off the hot water so I thought I’d give a report about how things went.
I thought that I would start using the sun shower when I turned off the water, but that never really worked as I kept forgetting to get it in time. And when I did remember to get the sun shower I realized that in order to use one you need a place to hang it. This is not such a problem on a sailboat (where I’ve done the vast majority of my sunshowering) where there is a mast on which to hoist said shower. I do want to rig up a place to sunshower inside, hopefully inside our bathrooms. I didn’t want to risk just hanging it on the shower pipe where it sticks out of the wall because I envisioned breaking the plumbing and even if it didn’t break the spray hose would hang somewhere near my knee. So we need a sunshower solution.
I did get a pump pot for the bathroom and was surprised at how long it held hot water. I boiled water in my electric kettle and then would have hot water in the bathroom for wiping down or washing hands for a long time. Over night a few times it was still warm; much longer than the 8 hours it says on the package. Maybe if I was wanting it hot to drink like tea or coffee it wouldn’t be hot enough, but for hand washing it was often too hot and I had to add some cold out of the tap. So mostly it has been bucket baths around here for me. Hubby is showering at work when he goes and he and our son have been going to the Y 2x a week. I broke my little toe and haven’t been to the Y so today was my first real shower in a long long time.
The dishes were the most annoying part for me. This might be because the dishes are my least favorite chore anyway and they need doing at least twice a day. They seem to need a lot of water, and a lot of hot water at that. Now I know people say they wash dishes in cold water, but I really just can’t go there. I tried it and it seemed to take at least twice as much soap and water to get clean (and some stuff just didn’t come off) Maybe if you are a raw foodie you could get away with only washing in cold water.
Why are we back to hot water? The water heater was restarted because my son got sick with some gastro-intestinal yuckies and the laundry was quite…FOUL… I just couldn’t wash it on cold water and feel like things were clean. And there was a lot of it to be done, and I wasn’t about to make that much hot water in my electric kettle. So I turned on the water heater. It is going off again, and I hope to at least have some cheapy solar water set up soon so when the sun is out I can use hot water to wash some of the laundry. I’m thinking hose on the roof and sunshowers again. Maybe that is just because it has been such a lovely sunny day. Off to shut the heater off again. And now I know how to restart it when I need to. It was pretty frightening to do it the first time, but now it will be easier. Now I’m off to shut it off again. I know the water will stay hot for at least over night and so I can enjoy warm water for a while longer running from the tap.
