TV show "1900 House" in England; bathing & hot water

I was turning channels and happened to catch this program in the middle where they were trying to live a 1900 style life and having problems with the woodstove or coal stove getting enough hot water for a bath.

I could not resist this comment because most every person in the West of Europe and NorthAmerica are rather ignorant of the *smallest incremental

bath*. And that is why the lady in 1900 house was complaining. If she had known what the smallest incremental bath was, she would not have gotten the engineers to redo the stove because she wanted a bath that was to the standards of 1990s and not to the standards of year 1900.

Smallest Incremental Bathe: I discovered this in my youth and it makes sense. What it requires is 2 gallons of hot water (not boiling) but rather hot. And a wood stove can furnish 2 gallons easily in a matter of 1 to 2 hours. The bathtub has two buckets in it. And I know that in 1900 there was no plastic buckets. Two buckets of about 2 gallons capacity each. So you have two buckets in

the bathtub and you fill them with about 1/3 to 1/2 room temperature water and the remaining is filled with the hot water coming from the wood stove. One bucket is wash and the other is rinse. The bathtub serves mostly as a place for the water to flow out (or you can stop the water and collect it and use it for watering plants later.) So the bathe itself consists of stooping in the bathtub. Wetting down and then soaping down with a minor rinse and all the wash water is gone. then you use the second bucket as a final rinse. Total amount of water used is

4 gallons. If you really want to conserve then 3 gallons is very adequate.

The trouble with 1900 House as shown on TV is that modern day people have lost sight of what bathing in old times was really all about.

Example: I have a gallon wash pitcher and its huge bowl. England made alot of these porcelain bowls and pitchers in the past because that is the way most people came home to wash their hands and face. Not in a filled sink full of water. And not a bathtub full of water for a bathe.

Archimedes Plutonium, a snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com whole entire Universe is just one big atom where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

Reply to
Archimedes Plutonium
Loading thread data ...

PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.