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Cakefool posted:How do you turn the light off?
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Apr 28, 2013 22:55
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| # ? May 14, 2024 19:57 |
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Yesterday I was at an outdoor concert in the courtyard between some new restaurants and shops downtown. The area was pretty nice, but the bathroom kind of scared me. I turned the sink on to wash my hands, and the fluorescent lights overhead went dim. At first I figured it was just coincidence, but I turned the faucet off and they got brighter. So I turned the faucet on and off a few times, and the light got dimmer every time I turned it on. I don't want to even know what you have to gently caress up to make that happen.. 
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Apr 29, 2013 07:13
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Mizufusion posted:Yesterday I was at an outdoor concert in the courtyard between some new restaurants and shops downtown. The area was pretty nice, but the bathroom kind of scared me. I turned the sink on to wash my hands, and the fluorescent lights overhead went dim. At first I figured it was just coincidence, but I turned the faucet off and they got brighter. So I turned the faucet on and off a few times, and the light got dimmer every time I turned it on. I don't want to even know what you have to gently caress up to make that happen.. For some reason this reminds me of that old bit of apocrypha about a floating switch connected to an ancient computer causing it to crash. In your case, though....gently caress. I can't even try to reason that one out, unless there was some sort of electric water pump in play somewhere, or there was some very creative wiring that involved using the plumbing as a ground, but connected it to neutral instead. Or something even more hosed.
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Apr 29, 2013 07:21
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Mizufusion posted:Yesterday I was at an outdoor concert in the courtyard between some new restaurants and shops downtown. The area was pretty nice, but the bathroom kind of scared me. I turned the sink on to wash my hands, and the fluorescent lights overhead went dim. At first I figured it was just coincidence, but I turned the faucet off and they got brighter. So I turned the faucet on and off a few times, and the light got dimmer every time I turned it on. I don't want to even know what you have to gently caress up to make that happen.. Maybe a tankless water heater switching on for hot water at the sink?
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Apr 29, 2013 09:56
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You want to see a scary mix of plumbing and electrical work? Go to a washroom in Korea or China! Generally speaking, the toilet, shower head, and washing machine occupy the same room in most middle-class apartments built before 2000 and are all well withing spraying distance of the shower head. My first place in Korea had a built-in shower head and light fixture occupying the same 5x5" area on the wall. My first place in China had the washing machine 3 feet to the right of the shower head. You actually had to lean against it to shower. My second place in Korea had the light fixture on the other side of the room from the shower head, and the washer was behind a sliding glass door, but there was an outlet directly below the shower head, so if you stood under it at the right angle, water would deflect off of you and onto/into the outlet. The first thing I did was buy a tube of silicone and literally covered the entire thing so that you couldn't even see it. My friend in Korea had an apartment where taking wet clothes out of the washing machine would give you a little "tingle" and the tiny 3 gallon electric hot water heater was mounted on the wall outside the bathroom window, exposed to the elements (it was not an exterior unit, not that I think they even make exterior hot water heaters). All of these were 220V as well.
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Apr 29, 2013 15:11
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My mother found out this weekend that half of the second bedroom in her condo used to be a patio. She discovered this when she noticed a different feeling of the carpet in the corner of the room and when she pulled it up to check it out she located the old drain hole. On the plus side if the place ever floods we know where to drain the water.
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Apr 29, 2013 15:35
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Blistex posted:You want to see a scary mix of plumbing and electrical work? Go to a washroom in Korea or China! I'll add: Morocco. These are from the hostel I stayed at in Marrakesh.  Yes, it looks like it would just be a toilet room for the squat toilet, but no, it's also now a shower. Disgusting and horribly unsafe.  Slip on that porcelain into the poo poo hole and you're gonna need pins to hold your broken bones together.  And uh.. watch your head/face/eyes. Not really pictured is that the warm water is supplied by a propane-powered on-demand heater sitting right outside (you can kind of see if in the first photo). The tank of propane is on the floor right underneath it. It didn't work very well.
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Apr 29, 2013 19:16
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DNova posted:
Haha, wow. "gently caress you." - The Management
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Apr 29, 2013 19:22
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South America has that beat: Not my image, but I've encountered one in a former coworker's house in Miami. They terrify me, he thought it was completely normal.
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Apr 30, 2013 00:17
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MrYenko posted:South America has that beat: Haha yeah, I was waiting until I got home to get access to my Nicaragua pictures, the nice hotel we stayed in had that same setup with the water heater on the shower head and wire-nutted wiring right there in the shower with you.
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Apr 30, 2013 00:27
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:That pencil sharpener looks many many times older than that nice wooden railing you have there, meaning they pretty much went "How do I turn on a light far away? I've got just the thing!" Now you're thinking the Rex Eddy way! And I could almost get the logic if they had somehow involved turning the handle of the pencil sharpener in the light turning-on process, but it's just anchored there to keep the wire from falling on the ground. A task that could be accomplished by basically anything else in the world, up to and including the railing itself. And yes, it connects to just a regular pull-toggle, such as one would put on a normal light if that light were not attached to the roof and out of reach of any human hand.
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Apr 30, 2013 01:50
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Cakefool posted:How do you turn the light off? http://youtu.be/rOrDCpAv-sM?t=1m50s
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Apr 30, 2013 02:19
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Blistex posted:You want to see a scary mix of plumbing and electrical work? Go to a washroom in Korea or China! The place I lived in China had the same thing here -- an electrical outlet directly below the shower head inside the shower. It also had a second outlet on the back wall, opposite the shower head. Also , the water heater was the gas type and extremely poorly adjusted. The heater was pressure-sensitive and wouldn't kick the burner on unless there was a certain amount of water flowing through it. However, because the shower had one of those single-turn pressure and temperature adjustment knobs, you couldn't get enough water flow through the hot pipes without simultaneously decreasing the flow in the cold pipe and adjusting the temperature. So you had a catch-22 of a system: when the lever was raised high enough to get the water flow needed to activate the burner, there was nowhere near enough cold water to balance it out and it came out literally scalding hot. When you turned the lever down to adjust the temperature appropriately, the pressure in the heater would drop, turning it off, and in about 10 seconds it'd be icy again. For the first couple of weeks I managed by dancing back and forth and showering in the 10-second period between the two steady states; later I would discover that if I pointed the showerhead up as far as it would go (narrowly missing the electrical outlet on the back wall, remember) the scalding water would cool down enough in its flight time that I could tolerate it if I hunkered down in the back corner. I thought about trying to adjust the heater for more appropriate pressure-sensitivity or decreased heat output, but if that's what passes for plumbing and electrical work in China, no way in hell was I going to mess with an appliance full of natural gas.
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Apr 30, 2013 02:35
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While we are on the topic of South America, here is the wiring in a hostel I stayed at a couple weeks ago. Yes that is a scorch mark. 
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Apr 30, 2013 02:47
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MrYenko posted:South America has that beat: My wife from Brazil saw this post over my shoulder and apparently her parents have this exact model in their shower. For those wondering, it is installed the usual way in this photo, wires and all. When I went to visit her in São Paulo before she moved here, she spent some time trying to find a flat for us to stay in that didn't have an electric showerhead because she wasn't sure exactly how I would handle such a thing.
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Apr 30, 2013 21:24
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Heresiarch posted:My wife from Brazil saw this post over my shoulder and apparently her parents have this exact model in their shower. For those wondering, it is installed the usual way in this photo, wires and all. So is it just that the houses don't have a dual set of pipes for both hot and cold water, or are electrical hazards just a cool thing that caught on with everyone so buildings just come like that?
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Apr 30, 2013 23:22
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:So is it just that the houses don't have a dual set of pipes for both hot and cold water, or are electrical hazards just a cool thing that caught on with everyone so buildings just come like that? The vast majority of housing in São Paulo (and maybe Brazil, I don't know) has no hot water piping at all. There are also electric faucets for kitchen sinks, although most people just wash their dishes in cold water. 
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May 1, 2013 07:55
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Blistex posted:You want to see a scary mix of plumbing and electrical work? Go to a washroom in Korea or China! For reference - they do make exterior hot water heaters. They're standard in Australia. And I like the idea of an electrical hot water heater on your tap, though the idea seems insanely mad sciency, especially when the wires are all exposed. It's like they looked at where other people might put the heater - in another room, in a cupboard, under the sink - and thought, gently caress that, lets put a bulky electrical hazard above the water!
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May 2, 2013 18:53
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Konomex posted:And I like the idea of an electrical hot water heater on your tap, though the idea seems insanely mad sciency, especially when the wires are all exposed. On demand hot water at the sink/shower it's used is a good idea and is used many places. It's the "electrical parts exposed to casual splashing of water" part that's horrifying. If I had one of those things I'd want it under the sink and connected to something far more grounded than *me*.
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May 3, 2013 00:05
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ductonius posted:On demand hot water at the sink/shower it's used is a good idea and is used many places. It's the "electrical parts exposed to casual splashing of water" part that's horrifying. If I had one of those things I'd want it under the sink and connected to something far more grounded than *me*. So something like a Quooker tap then?
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May 3, 2013 11:43
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HERAK posted:So something like a Quooker tap then? In my old apartment, the water heater was turned way way up for a couple of weeks, probably by mistake. Let me tell you, near-boiling water is amazing for cleaning dishes by hand as long as you're careful.
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May 3, 2013 11:51
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KozmoNaut posted:In my old apartment, the water heater was turned way way up for a couple of weeks, probably by mistake. Now I'm wondering how easy it would be to make some sort of box cover for the sink and hook it up to a steam unit. My steam cleaner is amazing on everything else, if I could blast my dishes with steam it might clean them in moments... It might also melt anything made of plastic.
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May 3, 2013 16:58
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Konomex posted:if I could blast my dishes with steam It's called an "autoclave" and it's how you clean surgical instruments. However live steam is really goddamn dangerous.
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May 3, 2013 19:19
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Leperflesh posted:It's called an "autoclave" and it's how you clean surgical instruments. If you just wanted to clean dishes, however, you could dispense with the pressurization, which would make it a good deal safer. Of course, consumers are idiots, so this would never fly unless it had 12 interlocks, temeprature lockouts, and several labels indicating it is NOT FOR CLEANING YOUR CHILD/PET
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May 3, 2013 19:28
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Slanderer posted:If you just wanted to clean dishes, however, you could dispense with the pressurization, which would make it a good deal safer. *realdolls okay
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May 3, 2013 19:33
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Slanderer posted:If you just wanted to clean dishes, however, you could dispense with the pressurization, which would make it a good deal safer. Steam produces lots of condensation the instant it contacts cooler air, though. (You can see this in action when you boil water on the stove: all that billowing white stuff is condensation, not steam. Steam is transparent.) Without pressurization, it's difficult to heat the air up enough to have your steam stay steam as it moves from the heat source, all the way into contact with whatever you're trying to steam. Essentially what you're doing instead is hosing something down with really hot water. In which case, you might as well not dump in the extra energy it took to cross the liquid/gas phase change, and just wash your dishes with water 1 degree below boiling.
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May 3, 2013 20:07
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Leperflesh posted:Steam produces lots of condensation the instant it contacts cooler air, though. (You can see this in action when you boil water on the stove: all that billowing white stuff is condensation, not steam. Steam is transparent.) Without pressurization, it's difficult to heat the air up enough to have your steam stay steam as it moves from the heat source, all the way into contact with whatever you're trying to steam. I worded that badly--use low pressure steam, instead of high pressure systems that can result in a jet of steam that maims you from 10 feet away. EDIT: Nevermind, actually--looks like autoclaves use lower pressure than I had imagined.
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May 3, 2013 20:50
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My great grandfather had an idea for an all-tiled kitchen with totally waterproof fittings, to be cleaned with the sort of high pressure steam hose you find on ships. There would be a drain in the floor for the condensing water. A bonus is that you could put down mutinies from the central steam system.
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May 4, 2013 13:45
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Slanderer posted:I worded that badly--use low pressure steam, instead of high pressure systems that can result in a jet of steam that maims you from 10 feet away. A friend of the family had an incident with a high-pressure steam valve at work when I was a kid. (Him and my father worked together at an oil-fired steam turbine power plant.) The bonnet of a valve blew off when he turned the valve wheel, and he took a jet of ~450psi live steam to his right hand and lower arm. It stripped the flesh almost to the bone, in places, and it took him more than a year to get use of his hand back. He was lucky he was standing off to the side of the valve, instead of in front of it.
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May 4, 2013 13:54
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Vindolanda posted:There would be a drain in the floor for the condensing water.
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May 4, 2013 17:03
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MrYenko posted:A friend of the family had an incident with a high-pressure steam valve at work when I was a kid. (Him and my father worked together at an oil-fired steam turbine power plant.) Yikes. How much of his flesh grew back?
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May 4, 2013 19:36
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Detroit Q. Spider posted:Yikes. How much of his flesh grew back? He got 90% function of the elbow back, and his hand was mostly ok. Never looked right, though.
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May 4, 2013 19:41
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Vindolanda posted:My great grandfather had an idea for an all-tiled kitchen with totally waterproof fittings, to be cleaned with the sort of high pressure steam hose you find on ships. There would be a drain in the floor for the condensing water. A bonus is that you could put down mutinies from the central steam system. That was a common idea in the '50s for the "House of the Future! Hose off all your rooms into the drain on the floor!" It turns out that it's a terrible idea since waterproofing still hasn't been perfected, plus all that humidity promotes mold growth and things like electronics actually need to be open to the air to radiate heat. I can see that failing in the kitchen since it would be near impossible to get every surface sloped correctly for drainage and to keep water out of your cabinets with perishable groceries.
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May 4, 2013 21:30
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It works fine in commercial kitchens.
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May 4, 2013 21:55
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Vindolanda posted:My great grandfather had an idea for an all-tiled kitchen with totally waterproof fittings, to be cleaned with the sort of high pressure steam hose you find on ships. There would be a drain in the floor for the condensing water. A bonus is that you could put down mutinies from the central steam system. I've always wanted to build a bathroom like that. Would make cleaning it much easier.
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May 4, 2013 22:08
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Veeb0rg posted:I've always wanted to build a bathroom like that. Would make cleaning it much easier. Yeah, he thought of it when he came to New York in the 1900s, when steam heating was The Way Of The Future, but apparently he asked his wife (as official woman, and therefore kitchen-knower), and she didn't approve, which finished it right there. I believe it involved a complete change to the way buildings were constructed, so that humidity wouldn't collect in the walls.
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May 5, 2013 14:31
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For bathrooms, I think it's just called a wet room. It's kind of hip now, you just have half of your bathroom designated as wet, and it is all waterproof, shower style, and then you don't have a shower curtain or door. I don't know of it's actually a good idea but it mixes up the design a bit.
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May 5, 2013 14:54
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smackfu posted:For bathrooms, I think it's just called a wet room. It's kind of hip now, you just have half of your bathroom designated as wet, and it is all waterproof, shower style, and then you don't have a shower curtain or door. I don't know of it's actually a good idea but it mixes up the design a bit. Some of the nicer hotel and apartment bathrooms in Korea and China are designed this way. The Shower is usually just around a corner, so there is no need for a curtain or a door. There will be a drain in the shower, and another in the other half of the bathroom. Typically the bathroom is 100% tile, and you keep your towels and stuff outside in a closet just in the hallway, so you can go nuts with a bottle of bleach and the shower head when you want to clean. Being this is the "Crappy construction Thread" I have a related story. My first apartment in Korea was actually a 4 student room turned apartment in the girl's dorm at the high-school I was working at. It was brand new, and they finished my room a week after I moved in. What was scary was that I would be showering, brushing my teeth, or just surfing the net and I would hear a massively loud "crack", almost like a gunshot coming from the bathroom. I could never figure out what it was until one day I came back from work and found that one of the tiles had cracked in half, and fallen off the wall of the bathroom. It seems that (for expediency sake) the contractors had cemented the tiles directly to the cement walls, as in the structural concrete walls that made up the dormitory. As the building was brand new, there was still some settling and compression going on. The tiles didn't compress though, and some of them cracked, some of them fell off, but most of them "popped" their adhesive and stayed in place on the wall due to their neighbors holding them there, but made that very loud "crack" sound I had been hearing. In total about 3 actually came off, and another 3 cracked, so the contractors came back and fixed those. Same contracting company doing a retaining wall outside my apartment. I could see from the 8th floor that they left a massive gap in one spot of the forms, and I actually yelled at them to stop, and ran down. By the time I got down they had already been pouring for about 20 seconds and I had to point out that they were losing a few yards of cement.  It's hard to tell from the picture, but that spill right there is about 5 bathtubs worth, and over the next minute the remainder of the cement in the forms would leak out due to the pressure being too much to plug the 12"x 12" gap they left. Also, that guy sitting there on the forms dropped his cell phone into the mix, but managed to fish it out since it just landed on top and didn't sink.
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May 5, 2013 16:00
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That's an amazing wall/slab alright. How awful was the cleanup?
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May 6, 2013 01:21
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7thBatallion posted:I got all of you beat. By a mile. I could be cheap and say "SR 520 Replacement project," but that's too easy. Instead I'll go with the 126th St/405 overpass. Do you have any sources for this? I live in the Seattle area so I'm a little curious what the extent of the fuckups are. Please tell me that its at least not the same contractors who are about to start that deep bore tunnel under downtown. edit: This article seems to indicate its the state's design work that caused the problems, but it wouldn't surprise me if the contractors were being assholes too. oXDemosthenesXo fucked around with this message at 03:51 on May 6, 2013 |
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May 6, 2013 03:45
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