IS IT possible to have a shower of constant warmth when you鈥檙e sharing a hot-water supply?
Christina Matzke at the University of Bonn in Germany and Damien Challet of the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy, used a mathematical model to show that shower temperature becomes increasingly sensitive to small changes in hot-water flow as the number of users increases. Thus in a youth hostel, for example, the showers often fluctuate between scalding hot and ice cold during heavy use.
The temperature can stabilise, however, if bathers adopt a range of strategies for adjusting the shower taps 鈥� for example, if some fiddle with the hot tap while others tweak the cold. But that comes at a price: what hot water there is then gets distributed evenly, so everyone鈥檚 shower becomes colder than they might like ().
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