The Thermostatic Shuffle

And now, a bit of complaining…..

It's an issue I've discussed here before a couple of times, but not very recently. In any case, for the record, let me re-emphasize the point: If you're looking at a home that comes appointed with a thermostatic shower valve in the master bathroom, grab the nearest heavy and/or sharp object and plunge it into the skull of your real estate agent.

For the second time in four years, I'm having to slip out of work during the middle of the day to breathlessly sprint down to a far-flung, specialized bathroom fixture emporium in Tribeca to pay a bracing two hundred smackers for a rarified Perrin & Rowe ROHL thermostatic shower cartridge. Why am I doing this? Well, it's either the curse of designed obsolescence or simply that my family bathes too often. Either way, the water temperature control in the sole bathroom/shower of our home has fallen grossly out of calibration. In plain English, we have zero hot water. The only solution, according to my building's super, is to get a new cartridge. To suggest that this is inconvenient and unrestful is a Herculean understatement.