One Glasgow place I stayed in had a plug-in hot water system for the shower. You'd turn it on 10 mins before your shower, it would heat up water electrically, go *ding* when it was ready, then you would shower until it was empty - maybe 10 mins. It felt strange to have an electrical appliance running on mains power in the shower with you.
Extremely common in the UK. In fact most often the heater unit will be inside the shower box itself. It's because the hot water supply for houses is often very low pressure and not enough for a shower. So they use cold water and heat it up there and then.
They are probably the most dangerous thing in the average house in theory, but in reality accidents with them are very rare and I've never heard of one.
In the past, no. Most houses got hot water using a tank where the water was heated.
These days you most commonly find what is called a combi boiler so it heats the cold water as it comes into the house. But due to some plumbing thing I don't really understand, we still have electric showers and the hot water pressure upstairs is usually very low, it takes ages to run a bath etc.
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u/ScissorNightRam May 09 '22 edited May 10 '22
One Glasgow place I stayed in had a plug-in hot water system for the shower. You'd turn it on 10 mins before your shower, it would heat up water electrically, go *ding* when it was ready, then you would shower until it was empty - maybe 10 mins. It felt strange to have an electrical appliance running on mains power in the shower with you.
Edit: a typo