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We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Water Heater

May 15th, 2010 · No Comments · Abu Dhabi

We had heard of this phenomenon even before we got here. It sounded a bit apocryphal. The sort of story that gets passed around by people trying to emphasize Just How Hot It Is here.

But now we have lived it.

By the time May comes around … you do not need to heat the water you bathe in. That is what we heard, anyway.

Through April, we weren’t sure this was true. Then …

The other day, we could hardly coax out water cool enough — from the li’l shower in The Teeny Apartment — to be able to stand in it. It was hot, hot, hot, even with the controls wrenched all the way over to “freezing cold.”

So, we turned off the water heater. To see if it was about the temperature of the “cold” water being plenty hot already or whether we had some sort of plumbing malfunction.

Sure enough. It is environmental, and not about our plumbing.

Turned on the shower today, a full 24 hours after shutting down the water heater … and it was as hot as I could want. But not scalding. Which means it was at least 100 degrees (Fahrenheit) but less than, say, 110 degrees.

Which makes perfect sense. Because the daily average high temperate has been over 100 for most of the past three weeks. And the lows have been above 80.

Unless the water pipes are buried quite deep — and apparently, they are not, at our place — just regular ol’ tap water probably is going to be around 100 degrees now.

Sure seems like it at my house, anyway.

A colleague here said he lived at a place where the water came to his room from a reservoir on the roof, and in the summer, the sun cooked the reservoir until the “cold” water was so hot he could hardly stand it.

The flip side of this?

You know it is “winter” when, after six months or so, you find it preferable to turn the water heater back on. Generally, this occurs sometime in November.

So, water heaters … a necessity here. For half the year, only.

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