memes

What kind of fucked shower knob turns counterclockwise

In seriousness, it’s often about water pressure and how your hot water is fed. If you have very high water pressure normally but a solar hot water system where gravity and input pressure play a role, you’ll naturally have an imbalance on hot and cold. When you turn the handle on the shower you’re lining up two holes in the shower cartridge (in the handle) with the two hot and cold water pipes, the resulting mix comes out a third hole which feeds the shower head. As you turn the handle, one hole opening gets smaller and the other bigger- thereby changing the ratio of hot : cold. When you already have a huge pressure of cold water pumping in, the degree of rotation needed to go from warm/almost just right to PURE HOT WATER is minuscule. Usually the cold will stay pretty cold for about half of the handle range of motion too.

If water input pressure being high is a problem you can put a reducing valve on your system overall or you can buy Venturi style pumps which add pressure into your hot water system.

You’ll normally find when it’s pressure imbalance that it’s easier to balance the temp when the tap isn’t open full bore. But who wants a weak-ass shower stream!!

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Observe while I shower comfortably with:

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They're so sensitive because the person who installed them didn't care enough to adjust the regulator. If this bothers you, you can take the handle off yourself with an allen wrench and adjust the valve so that when you turn it on, it's the perfect temperature for you every time.

Okay I'm gonna be real. I didn't understand the meme at first and thought you were showing a melted door handle and the guy in the meme was trying to melt another door handle with his mind

I was fully prepared to read a bunch of comments about how are door handles so sensitive to heat due to their metallic composition and how you absolutely cannot melt things with your mind that the actual comments tripped me

Weird.

I saw "melts tungsten" and my brain decided this was in German.

Set your water heater lower. Like: make sure it's above 120 at all times (130+ preferably) to prevent legionnaire's, but 140 is PLENTY for most home uses. And it means you get a bigger range to move your mixer taps to.

Your water heater is set too hot or you don't have a mixing valve after your water heater

Probably American build.

Nah, Brougham.

All the way to the left, then back off 1/16".

Burn me, baby.

So there are lots of good answers, but there's one I haven't seen: The type of shower control in the photo is probably low quality, cheap, meaning the internal parts do a poor job of mixing the hot/cold water.

Adjusting the water heater may help, but you might also consider upgrading the shower faucet.

You should just move to a more tropical area. Where I live, I only ever use the "Cold" tap and sometimes, even that is too warm.

I know most chronic internet users don’t adjust their boiler temp settings. But there are easy ways to fix this.

Lower flow temperature makes it easier to adjust.

My kitchen faucet is like this. It's one of those with single little stalk to regulate both temperature and pressure. Not only do you need to get it precisely right for the correction temperature, you also need to get it right for the pressure. Not far enough up and you get a little drizzle, too far and it splashes everywhere. And the stalk is kind of sticky as well, as you push it there is no movement until suddenly it moves. So making small adjustments is really hard

The cartridge is likely bad. They get clogged up with lime scale over time and start to perform worse and worse. Either replace the cartridge or the whole faucet itself.

Come to Japan (and, so I've heard, several European countries) where we have a temperature setting on the tap. Mine caps at 40 by default, but you can press a little button and make it hotter if desired (up to however hot your water heater puts out).