To take a shower

Or:
On The Perversity of Inanimate Objects

The day after moving in to This Odd House I looked forward to taking advantage of its many features, one of which was a deep shower off the master bedroom.  I woke up and entered the shower chamber, a commitment to getting wet, since there is no way to turn on the water that is not in its direct and immediate path from the showerhead.

I had two surprises.  First, after turning on the cold water faucet, the handle came off in my hand.  With the cold water streaming down on me, and with no control on its flow, I tried to temper the shock by turning on the hot water.  The second surprise was that there was no hot water.

The week earlier, planning for the upstairs kitchen renovation, the demolition party team had removed a sink and dishwasher.  This required that the water supply to the second floor be shut off, an easy task once the shutoff valves in the basement were located.

For whatever reason, the hot water to the master bathroom was on that same line. The cold water was not.  So with no hot water, I endured a frigid dowsing as I frantically tried to re-attach the faucet handle and turn off the blast of cold.

This was my induction to This Odd House.

I had to abandon my desire for hot showers when a while later, the hot water to the entire house was shut down, a consequence of removing the chimney.   During this time I “couch-surfed” at friends and relatives homes, taking advantage of their hospitality and hot water.

Eventually the hot water supply to TOH was restored, and now I could refocus my attention to the master shower.  First, why did that faucet knob come off?  I tried to press it back onto the valve stem, but there was no traction.  I examined the plumbing and could not figure out the mechanism.

Fortunately, I have (intermittent) access to the internet, and I was able to do Google searches on “how to…”  This was often productive, because the next search word would auto-fill in the remainder of the request:  “how to repair shower…” There were several options; I selected “faucets”.  Earlier, I had wanted to know how to remove wallpaper.  There were other interesting options offered after typing in “how to strip…”.

My faucet repair search did not immediately solve my problem, but the results hinted at the search terms I really needed.  Eventually I found my exact plumbing configuration:  Modern faucet knobs, it turns out, are incapable of reliably turning on and off the hot and cold water.  This is because the water valve is controlled by a “spline” fitting, a small gear-like metal extension that fit into a conventional metal knob (think of those four-winged metal or ceramic handles that your parents or grandparents had in their sink marked “H” and ”C”).

The metal handles fit the spline gear perfectly, and reliably turned the water on and off millions of times.  The modern acrylic handles on the other hand, looked nice, but were easily “stripped”, their matching spline teeth rounded off by the pressure required to open and close the water valve.

The industry solution to this was not to abandon plastic faucet knobs in favor of the more sturdy metal models of yore, but to invent an adapter.  If the modern plastic could not provide the required torque for an 8- or 12- tooth spline, maybe it could cope with a simple stem head that was square.  So the solution was to add an intermediate part, a mechanical gear “shim”, that would convert the spline stem to a square stem.

And this is what I was facing in the shower.  I had no idea how to fix this until seeing the “universal handle adapter” on a web page.  Once seeing it however, I knew instantly what to do: use the appropriate Allen-wrench to secure the square adapter to the spline stem, and then place the faucet knob over it.

I could now turn the cold water on, AND OFF.

Universal Handle Adapters. You probably didn’t know that you need them.