For 90 percent of the folks in Costa Rica, there are no hot-water heaters like back in the States. A lot of the smaller hotels have the same systems: Hot water on demand, heated by electricity as the water goes through the shower head.
Some folks like to call them suicide showers. We have them in our house and never had any electrical issues and a million or so folks that live here use the same system. It's efficient and you never run out of hot water.
For some folks, however, it proves to be a Rubki-ian puzzle that they spend days trying to figure out (with some griping and whinging--"whinging" is for our occasional U.K. reader).
It's really pretty simple: The more water pressure you have, the cooler the shower. The less water pressure, the warmer the shower. It cannot be too low of a flow, or else the heating element will not turn on, or it will burn out--thus ensuring you will have a cold shower until we can get up to repair it.
Try as they might, some people simply cannot figure it out. We go up and play with the shower, and it comes out warm. They show up at breakfast the next day and say there's no hot water. We go down again, and it's working fine. It's just a matter of tweaking the water flow.
When people check in here at the hotel, we give them the directions for the shower (though to be fair, it takes 5 minutes to give folks the run-down on the showers) and we also tell them that there is a page in the hotel information book that explains how it works.
Sometimes, you just can't get it through, though.
No comments:
Post a Comment