 |
A project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it. By Mark Hurst. |
| About Mark Hurst | Mark's Gel Conference | New York Times Story on This Is Broken | Newsletter: Subscribe | RSS Feed |
Search this site:
Categories:
- Advertising
- Current Affairs
- Customer Service
- Fixed
- Food and Drink
- Just for Fun
- Misc
- Not broken
- Place
- Product Design
- Signs
- Travel
- Web/Tech
Previous: Connecticut emergency broadcast test | Main | Next: Honda CRV warning light
February 3, 2005 12:18 AM
Broken: Days Inn shower handle
Kris writes:
I was initially confused by this warning in the shower at a Days Inn in Tucson, AZ. Actually come to think of it, I am still confused.
[And how is this a "scald guard"? -mh]
I think what it means is you have to go past hot, into a superhot world where you are so far past hot that your handle is back to cold again.
Scary place if you ask me.
After googling, it appears that there's a mechanism in it which turns down the hot water if it detects the user has the temperature turned up too high to prevent them from being scalded when the water comes on.
So I guess by turning the control all the way to "cold", the regulator isn't triggered, allowing the user to turn it back toward "hot".
This seems pretty straight forward, turn the water all the way to cold and then turn it to set your temperature. Label could be clearer though.
Straight forward?
I've got it all the way to cold, where's my hot water?
Oh wait, do they mean 'all the way to cold *first*'? Now I turn it back to hot?
What a place to have confusing instructions.
I believe it means that the knob will only turn to the right, meaning you have to go through cold to get to hot so you dont just turn it to hot and burn yourself
Straightforward? Things should work in an expected and intuitive way. With an "H" on one end and a "C" on the other, and the common convention that the more one turns the knob towards "H", the hotter the water becomes; what would you do to get the hottest water?
Would you expect your fuel gauge needle to register at "E" after you completely fill the tank?
Expectations have nothing to do with it.
If someone takes a shower and leaves it on full-blast 'hot', then someone else comes in after and takes a shower, they may leave it on hot and scald themselves. Hence 'Scald Guard'.
If it were SUPPOSED to work as per expectations, they wouldn't need a sign. If our county's citizens weren't so sue-happy, we wouldn't need strange showers.
If they put the entire explanation and reasoning on each sign, that would be a waste of time, space, and effort.
Obviously the warning could be better written, I don't dispute this. All it is trying to convey is that okay you get in the shower is at warm. Let's say you want really hot, you have to turn the water to fully cold, and then move it towards the hot until you reach the super hot temperature you desire. This is so that when you leave and the water is still super hot, your kid gets in and is not scalded. You must actively turn off the scald prevention by first going to full cold.
The labeling clearly could improve, but I appreciate the fact that I don't have to have a lukewarm shower in the name of safety.
One thing I just noticed. Isn't it funny that the red warning text is to keep the shower curtain inside the tub and not the usual do not melt your skin off with your freaking hot water?
My first thought when I saw this sign....
Maybe they have the faucet rigged so that all the way to the H is not hot enough to scald you. If you turn it all the way to the extreme C end, the water will become very hot.
What or who is this trying to protect? Perhaps it will protect children who are unfamilar with the working of a shower (or bath) from turning the water to the H so much that it would scald them.
Perhaps this was a lawsuit response?
"handle must be turned all the way to cold"
This could easily be fixed by adding "first" to that sentence, and making the arrow loop around from C and point back to H, showing exactly how you have to move the handle.
i dont see how someone can leave the water on super hot for the next person.
every single shower i have ever been in has always required turning the handle down from hot to cold then to off, meaning if you turn the shower off, you must reset the water back to cold.
-hot---cold---off-
their implementation of a 'scaldguard' is obviously a poor design. there is a much less confusing way to do this.
"Would you expect your fuel gauge needle to register at "E" after you completely fill the tank?"
my truck does that all the time, dont know why though... i guess the E stands for both, Empty, and Enough.
My new PT Cruiser doesn't register the fuel level until you put the key in and power up the dashboard-- which is stupid. Why should the car have to be on to check the fuel level? How hard is it to keep the fuel gauge accurate when the power's off?
Carl> Some showers I've seen use the handle's rotation to control the water temp, but you push the handle in towards the wall to turn the water off, and pull it to turn the water on. With such a handle you can easily turn the water on with the handle in the OMFG THIS IS HOT position.
Why are you staying in a Days Inn anyhow? It gets worse when you go downstairs for breakfast and try to work the waffle maker.
The exciting thing about ScaldGuard(tm) is that someone _else_ sets the level, so if you, oh, I don't know, have some incompetent "plumbers" install a tub enclosure w/the scald guard in your apartment then you get to take barely-warm showers for years with occasional visits by other incompetent "plumbers" who cannot fix it. This is all a fantastical, fictional scenario that has never happened to anyone ever but luckily no one was scalded.
OK, no one has figured this out yet? You don't turn it to cold then back to hot for hot, it just means that the hottest water will not come out if you turn it to hot. If you turn it far enough backwards however, the hottest water will come out. It isn't a very good scald guard, it would probably make more unexpeected scalds.
First of all, your an idiot for buy a PT Cruiser, that aside... fuel level is not a mechanical sense, it's electronic. Therefore there HAS to be power and WHY do you need to know how much gas there is when the piece o' crapola isn't on? Did you forget since you last got out?!?!
And for the "this is broken" comment... come on, how hard is to figure out that you need to turn the handle the opposite way from cold, all the way around past hot, until it stops at cold. There are TWO choices... hot and cold. Do you need an "I'm an idiot, this is past hot setting?"
I assume you get hot water from turning the handle counterclockwise (towards "hot"), and it gets hotter the farther you turn it. Thus, if you keep turning it so that it points at "cold" again, it will be as hot as it can get.
It's still stupid to have a sign about it though. ;P
If the scald guard works with a bi-metalic valve of some kind (think a mechanical thermometer), then the only way to reset a valve that has gotten too hot, is to cool it off. So, this kind of makes sense to me. Kinda.
But lemme tell you what REALLY annoys me about hotel showers. Well, all showers, for that matter....
So, in my parent's restaurant, they were dinged a point on their health inspection, because the faucets in the bathrooms were reversed. Apparently, there is a preconceived notion of which way knobs are supposed to turn. I didn't realize how innate this knowledge is, until I actually did try to use a backwards sink. I constantly turned the faucet full blast, instead of turning it off!
On top of this, there is an impression that hot is on the left, and cold is on the right.
So, what really bothers me, is to step into a shower and to be faced with a different knob every *&%# time I go in a hotel. Do you pull it? Twist it? Rock it? Which way is hotter? Colder? Off?
I think I'm reasonably intelligent... but unfamiliar shower controls make me feel stupid. :( Isn't there a safety situation there, as well? How many people have been scalded because they turned the knob the wrong way?
>And for the "this is broken" comment...
>come on, how hard is to figure out...
And how funny is it that the poster of this remark describing people who can't figure it out as idiots... has the explanation completely wrong?
That's what I love about this site: the posts from people going "this isn't broken, it's obvious how it works!!!" -- when it doesn't work like that :-)
Like someone else said, the sign could easily be un-broken by adding a "first" to the sentence:
"To reach maximum hot water temperature, handle must FIRST be turned all the way to cold"
There was a shower at a campground near Longcreek, SC where "C" meant hot and "H" meant cold:
Off C H
\
Here: off
Off C H
|
Here: hot
Off C H
/
Here: cold
My aunt was in there for 20 minutes, waiting for the water to warm up. She gave up then, bu as she was moving the lever to "Off" it got hot as she passed "C".
There was a shower at a campground near Longcreek, SC where "C" meant hot and "H" meant cold:
H
C \/
Off
off
H
C
Off
hot
H
C/\
Off
cold
My aunt was in there for 20 minutes, waiting for the water to warm up. She gave up then, bu as she was moving the lever to "Off" it got hot as she passed "C".
OK, I have used a faucet of this type before. If you notice, there is an arrow indicating the only way the knob can turn is to the left. It starts out Hot, and goes to cold, the hottest temperature being just before the cold. Then it goes to cold, and back off. Make sense? Not really huh?
I am writing for my daughter. She just bought an older condo and is running into problems. The one taking priority is in the plmbing catagory. When she turns the water on to take a shower, water gushes out of the shower head immediately soaking her, the floor, etc. She has no time to adjust the temp.or water flow. After pulling the button lever there is no change. She changed out the diverter to no avail. ==maybe you can give her some help; we sure would appreciate it!! We will eagerly await your reply. Thank you.
Comments on this entry are closed
Previous: Connecticut emergency broadcast test | Main | Next: Honda CRV warning light
well if its turned all the way to cold, you wont get any scalding hot water out of it...i guess the scaldguard part of it is working ;)
too bad the rest of this doesnt make any sense...
Posted by: Carl Winslow at February 3, 2005 12:46 AM