Having stayed in an "underground" (nowadays we'd call it passive design) BnB out there, it really is remarkably comfortable compared to the outside temperature. During the days it's bakingly hot, and freezing and dry at night; but always pleasant in the rooms, with no need for A/C or heating. Ventilation is a bit of a problem as you might expect, it got a bit stuffy.
Been decades since I stayed in a cave hotel in Coober Pedy, but I have stayed in a "trog" home in France and a cave BnB in Turkey - as much as the stuffiness, it felt like there was mineral-heavy dust always in the air, from the stone walls? My nose was quite sensitive to that.
I’ve been here and it’s very interesting talking to locals and seeing the place. The article SHOULD have mentioned the golf club! It’s basically desert and rocks and twinned with St Andrews! Brilliant!
Tom Scott had a fascinating video about the town a while back. Well, it was supposed to be about the town, and its water supply in particular, but became a video about the reliability of research and videos you find online.
I'm an American citizen and I needed to go to the hospital in Coober Pedy in 2009. It was after hours, so I rang the bell up front and a cheerful nurse responded on the intercom. My case was deemed sufficient to merit a response, so the nurse and a doctor both came over at once and booted up the place. I got my exam, some crutches, and a prescription in about an hour and $45.
Also all the water is trucked in, so shower stalls are often coin-fed. Works OK except when there is no warning that you're about to run out of water and your face is covered in soap. Makes it hard to find and fidget with coins.
> Also all the water is trucked in, so shower stalls are often coin-fed. Works OK except when there is no warning that you're about to run out of water and your face is covered in soap.
Seems like you'd get used to it quickly.
In Chinese apartments (in Shanghai, at least), there is a small water heater dedicated to the shower. It stores a certain amount of water at a temperature you configure, and when it runs out, your shower will be cold. (You're expected to set it much hotter than you want the shower, and mix it with cold water, which is unlimited, to get the shower temperature you want.)
This means it's impossible to take a two-hour hot shower. But it also means the showering process doesn't include "step 0: wait a few minutes for hot water to start coming out of the shower". When you turn on the hot water, you get hot water. It's really soured me on the American system.
As an American, most places that I've lived in across the country had a delay before the hot water kicked in. Of course anyone can modify their home to do whatever they want, but we're discussing the average system in place in most residences.
It's not a "gross oversimplification" if it's the typical result.
I can't count the number of time Americans (from all over the States) have explained to me how diverse America actually is. Ironically it's only Americans who've done this.
Well it's usually when someone from outside America says "Americans do it this way" based on their vacations or even single trips to a single point in America, having stayed in an AirBNB or hotel or something.
To actual American citizens you might as well be characterizing France from your experience in Germany just because they're both in the EU.
Tankless water heaters have a downside in that there's a minimum amount of flow before the heater turns on. I stayed at an Airbnb in Italy where I had to continuously run the sink in order to take a warm shower that wasn't scalding hot or cold. I also had to run the bathroom sink to get hot water at all in the kitchen because the kitchen faucet alone wasn't enough to trigger the heater!
A few minutes is an exaggeration. I would guess 15-30 seconds. Obviously it will depend on location. Some places it happens faster, some places slower. But I'm fairly certain I've never had to wait more than 60 seconds anywhere in the US.
In fact I just went and checked with my shower - 23 seconds. And I haven't used any hot water since last night.
No, it can take a few minutes. A big factor is the diameter of the pipes used to carry the hot water. See: This Old House videos on the topic. Bigger is NOT better here; a larger pipe may take several minutes to empty out of cold water before hot water starts reaching you.
In the rental house we just moved from a couple months ago, the last homeowner did several amateur projects (or hired a handyman who worked at that level). They fitted a larger, elevated water heater, but also "upgraded" the water pipes in the attic to a ridiculously large diameter. Between that and the rental property management fitting water-saving low-flow fixtures, you could turn on a hot water faucet and go boil tea on an electric kettle (or something) in the meantime. By the time you're done drinking the tea, the running water might be getting warm.
I believe you, but my hunch is you're an outlier. I've lived probably a dozen places in the US, not to mention the likely hundreds of places I've slept throughout my life. I don't recall every having to wait more than a minute for hot water.
Ultimately this is just my anecdata. Maybe your story is more common than I realize.
Anywhere can have plumbing issues and having wide hot water pipes is a problem as it waste energy when they cool down.
In such cases run the hot water in your sink it dramatically increases the flow rate. Alternatively, install a tankless water heater next to the shower.
Long waits are more common than you think. Suppose you have 100 feet of 3/4" pipe and a 1 gpm showerhead, it takes 2.3 minutes for water to move from your water heater to the showerhead. And you not only have to move the water, but heat up the pipe itself, so it takes even longer. I'm living in such a home now. I'll be installing a recirculation loop as I remodel. And probably some point-of-use heaters.
You turn on the hot water, and you get cold water. Then you sit and wait for a few minutes until you start getting hot water.
Depends on where you are. In places I've lived in the southwest, you turn on the hot water and you immediately get hot water. You turn on the cold water, and you immediately get very warm water.
Because it's the desert. And the water comes from outside, so it assumes the ambient temperature. In the winter you might get "cold" water, but it's nothing like the cold water you get in places like Boston or Minneapolis.
Had similar experience in Beppu, Japan. Not only is it at the southern tip oj Kyushu, but also very vulcanic with hot springs everywhere - like, there is actual scolding steam comming out of pavement in some places, specially in the Kanawa district!
At first I wondered why they have those mini fridges in japanese hotel rooms and this is why - only way to get cold water in the summer is t put it into the fridge first! :)
I have taken literally thousands of showers in America and that isn't consistent with my experience at all. If it takes more than ten seconds for my shower to heat up, it means that the water heater is dead and waiting any longer won't make a difference. The only place I've had to wait longer than that (but still not long enough that I'd go sit down to wait) is at some hotels, maybe because their plumbing is longer?
I grew up in a multi-story ~1700 sq ft home where I took daily showers on the second floor, traditional tanked hot water heater in the basement. Took < 20 seconds for water to turn hot.
Another place I stayed in Coober Pedy on another visit had a warning at 15 seconds which mitigated the problem. Both places only let you load up five minutes of shower time, and I found that my showers took 7-8 minutes.
In my town, outside of Boston, the water coming out of the faucets in mid-June is about 55F without mixing in hot water; an ambient-temperature shower might be reasonable for a week or three per year.
What American systems? There's lots of different water heating setups in the US, including “small dedicated tankless heater for the shower”, whole house tankless or hybrid system, etc., etc...
> it also means the showering process doesn't include "step 0: wait a few minutes for hot water to start coming out of the shower". When you turn on the hot water, you get hot water. It's really soured me on the American system.
The "American System" such as it is, is a byproduct of increasing efficiency. If you buy an old house, built when shower heads were 5GPM, the piping was sized to handle that load. When you switch to 2.5GPM shower heads (mandated as the maximum by federal law in 1994), or lower (1.25GPM is easy to find and what I use) then you've got 4X the amount of water setting in the pipes that needs to be slowly flushed out.
Any competent builders of new homes will minimize the size of hot water pipes to greatly reduce the amount of cold water that needs to be flushed out. Instead of 3/4 or 1/2" pipes, 3/8" or even 1/4" pipes may be adequate for a 1.8GPM (California 2018 maximum) shower, and greatly reduces the amount of cold water standing in the pipes.
The US system of using natural gas (or electric heat pumps) offers about 4X better energy efficiency than smaller resistive electric point-of-use water heaters. In warmers climates (southern US, and much of Asia) the difference can be small. And the centralized US system can be retrofitted easily enough. There are pump systems which can be installed under bathroom sinks where you just push a button and the cold water is pumped through, automatically shutting off when it becomes warm/hot.
Increasing energy efficiency, mayhaps, but running cold water in a shower for several min while you wait for it to heat up is not very water efficient.
You’re still flushing about* the same amount of water out of the pipes though. It just takes longer with a water efficient shower head. And as the parent poster points out this is solved by using smaller pipes.
* some of the hot water may cool while you wait so there may be a marginal amount of extra wastage at the outset.
In the 1800's and early 1900's, it was not uncommon for miners in the American southwest to build homes into the ground, simply because there was no other material available.
If you go to Shoshone, California, you can wander around their abandoned cave homes. There's a bunch across the street from the Inyo County Sheriff's substation. Just go up the dirt road, around the hill, past the cemetery.
At the time I visited in 2015, the residents told me that boring out a family home cost in the realm of $150,000 AUD which seemed like a bargain compared to the (still?) red hot Sydney real estate market.
Sure, but then you end up living in Coober Pedy. For slightly more you can live in a basic house/unit regionally, or for twice the price, a nice house in a nice regional town.
You couldn’t convince people to move to Coober Pedy if you paid them $150,000 to move there. The place is an interesting tourist attraction but the last place you would want to live.
There’s an opal line going right through the centre of Coober Pedy. Most who built there made a profit from the boring part, and extensions are a good way to make money too.
I have nothing to add but another pop culture reference from my childhood: Coober Pedy is one of the locations that the Cahill siblings visit in the sixth 39 Clues book, In Too Deep.
If you're in the western hemisphere and want to experience cave homes without going all the way to Australia I highly recommend Goreme and all of Cappadocia in Turkey. They have hotels built into cave homes thousands of years old, open air museums with cave cities and complexes from thousands of years ago. I went there because my girlfriend wanted to ride hot air balloons but I ended up loving it and being blown away by all the ancient ruins
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/357/gallery/
I also highly recommend that area. My brother and I had an amazing day where we climbed out of the regular paths and walked around for dozens of kilometres exploring valleys and climbing up into remote carved corridors and rooms. Found some incredible terrain.
If you're in the USA, you can find something similar to Cappadocia in Bandolier National Monument, New Mexico. Similar geology in the carved volcanic ash/tuff, plus a nice campground within walking distance.
Kind of funny that it mentions the distance to Canberra instead of the state capital Adelaide. No one cares where Canberra is except for politicians, sorry canberrans
I grew up going on opal fossicking holidays as a kid - Coober Pedy, Mintabie, White Cliffs, Lightning Ridge, etc. We'd camp somewhere and then spend the days digging around getting filthy and finding opal, which was great fun. My maternal uncle was an opal dealer at one point in life and both he and my paternal grandfather had opal cutting/polishing setups in their sheds at some point. My dad did a work placement up there for a few months, renting an underground place.
Beside the curiosity of underground living, Coober Pedy is a grim place. Hot, dry, dirty. You couldn't pay me to live there. There's a lot of cheap accommodation on real estate sites as a result.
I passed through last year on an outback trip, and stopped there for my kids to dig around. Way back, there were countless places you could "go noodling" (fossicking) but best bet last time seemed to be Jewellers Shop Road: https://goo.gl/maps/3thJiKfzY1YQaxkY6 It's picked pretty clean, but we found a few chips (small pieces) with colour (as opposed to less valuable forms like "potch") - you just have to be patient and have fairly focused kids!
Not sure how active the surrounding area is these days. Mostly seems to be idle blowers (vac-based machines that bring material up from shafts) and mullock heaps. I think the heavy action has progressively moved up to other opal fields a few miles out of town.
The story I always liked was about opal showing up under UV lighting. They'd rip up material from shafts with blowers and pass it along a conveyor belt for pickers to watch with UV lights and grab at opal as it went by. Only issue was that scorpions also glowed... You can see prospectors talking about using this method here: https://www.prospectingaustralia.com.au/forum/viewtopic.php?...
Probably my favourite memory was a place called Grasshopper in Mintabie. The operators would blast in an open cut mine with dynamite, and then huge grading machines would drag the leftover scraps up to an area they let the public pick over looking for smaller pieces of opal. We were like birds showing up on a lawn after it's been mown.
Another spot was Concrete/Cement Hill. My little brother (5yo at the time?) had become bored finding nothing and decided to make a cave house for a caterpillar he'd found. While the rest of us toiled with heavy tools, he mucked around with this bloody caterpillar, and found two pieces of opal worth $500-1000 in the process...
I've been near but not to Trona. Driven through Wonder Valley in California though which is pretty grim - at least that has low shrubs... This is what the area just outside Coober Pedy looks like: https://goo.gl/maps/C4E9xid1tY8CRp2f8 And closer in to the township: https://goo.gl/maps/1dZYqCgjB3nxzEfE7
White Cliffs is a similar town in New South Wales, though an order of magnitude smaller. Worth a visit if you're spending some time in the Broken Hill area.
My grandfather was the first white person born in White Cliffs. He didn't see another white kid until he was 12 years old. Due to his running with the indigenous kids, he became a great bushman, knowing law and language.
102 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadSoon to be very valuable...
I think houses without a basement will drop in value in the near future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaGTFeibOEk
https://www.espn.com.au/golf/story/_/id/13173734/st-andrews-...
Also all the water is trucked in, so shower stalls are often coin-fed. Works OK except when there is no warning that you're about to run out of water and your face is covered in soap. Makes it hard to find and fidget with coins.
Seems like you'd get used to it quickly.
In Chinese apartments (in Shanghai, at least), there is a small water heater dedicated to the shower. It stores a certain amount of water at a temperature you configure, and when it runs out, your shower will be cold. (You're expected to set it much hotter than you want the shower, and mix it with cold water, which is unlimited, to get the shower temperature you want.)
This means it's impossible to take a two-hour hot shower. But it also means the showering process doesn't include "step 0: wait a few minutes for hot water to start coming out of the shower". When you turn on the hot water, you get hot water. It's really soured me on the American system.
Tankless hot water systems have been available for awhile. Sounds like this is what you want to install.
Couple this with a pump/recirculation system and you'll have instant, endless hot water from any faucet or shower.
Granted, you won't have this option if you're renting and at the mercy of a landlord. But you can look for this in future apartments.
Some condo associations won't let you install them as it requires additional external piping for air intake and exhaust.
sinks too, theyre even easier. you can find kits at Home Depot.
Like most comments on HN, "American System" is a gross oversimplification of a nation of almost 400 million people and experiences.
It's not a "gross oversimplification" if it's the typical result.
To actual American citizens you might as well be characterizing France from your experience in Germany just because they're both in the EU.
It's really hard to talk about things when you can't generalize a bit.
"100 million American homes have things set up this way" - oh no, let's divert the discussion to worry about the one guy who has a fully custom setup!
In fact I just went and checked with my shower - 23 seconds. And I haven't used any hot water since last night.
In the rental house we just moved from a couple months ago, the last homeowner did several amateur projects (or hired a handyman who worked at that level). They fitted a larger, elevated water heater, but also "upgraded" the water pipes in the attic to a ridiculously large diameter. Between that and the rental property management fitting water-saving low-flow fixtures, you could turn on a hot water faucet and go boil tea on an electric kettle (or something) in the meantime. By the time you're done drinking the tea, the running water might be getting warm.
Ultimately this is just my anecdata. Maybe your story is more common than I realize.
In such cases run the hot water in your sink it dramatically increases the flow rate. Alternatively, install a tankless water heater next to the shower.
Depends on where you are. In places I've lived in the southwest, you turn on the hot water and you immediately get hot water. You turn on the cold water, and you immediately get very warm water.
Because it's the desert. And the water comes from outside, so it assumes the ambient temperature. In the winter you might get "cold" water, but it's nothing like the cold water you get in places like Boston or Minneapolis.
At first I wondered why they have those mini fridges in japanese hotel rooms and this is why - only way to get cold water in the summer is t put it into the fridge first! :)
The cost to remodel, and permit proses, causes owners to just live with it.
The drought should make the plumbing permit free.
Too many small towns, and even rich counties, are counting on those permit fees for income.
What American systems? There's lots of different water heating setups in the US, including “small dedicated tankless heater for the shower”, whole house tankless or hybrid system, etc., etc...
The "American System" such as it is, is a byproduct of increasing efficiency. If you buy an old house, built when shower heads were 5GPM, the piping was sized to handle that load. When you switch to 2.5GPM shower heads (mandated as the maximum by federal law in 1994), or lower (1.25GPM is easy to find and what I use) then you've got 4X the amount of water setting in the pipes that needs to be slowly flushed out.
Any competent builders of new homes will minimize the size of hot water pipes to greatly reduce the amount of cold water that needs to be flushed out. Instead of 3/4 or 1/2" pipes, 3/8" or even 1/4" pipes may be adequate for a 1.8GPM (California 2018 maximum) shower, and greatly reduces the amount of cold water standing in the pipes.
The US system of using natural gas (or electric heat pumps) offers about 4X better energy efficiency than smaller resistive electric point-of-use water heaters. In warmers climates (southern US, and much of Asia) the difference can be small. And the centralized US system can be retrofitted easily enough. There are pump systems which can be installed under bathroom sinks where you just push a button and the cold water is pumped through, automatically shutting off when it becomes warm/hot.
* some of the hot water may cool while you wait so there may be a marginal amount of extra wastage at the outset.
Do you actually have the habit of taking two-hour hot showers on a running shower? How incredibly wasteful would that be?
If you go to Shoshone, California, you can wander around their abandoned cave homes. There's a bunch across the street from the Inyo County Sheriff's substation. Just go up the dirt road, around the hill, past the cemetery.
Also it's a real "prospector town" since the massive mining companies consider it cost inefficient to mine there at scale so it's full of characters.
And the name makes it sound like a great place to host a KubeCon.
If you're in the USA, you can find something similar to Cappadocia in Bandolier National Monument, New Mexico. Similar geology in the carved volcanic ash/tuff, plus a nice campground within walking distance.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaodong
- How does the sewage system work?
- Do worms come into the living spaces?
Beside the curiosity of underground living, Coober Pedy is a grim place. Hot, dry, dirty. You couldn't pay me to live there. There's a lot of cheap accommodation on real estate sites as a result.
I passed through last year on an outback trip, and stopped there for my kids to dig around. Way back, there were countless places you could "go noodling" (fossicking) but best bet last time seemed to be Jewellers Shop Road: https://goo.gl/maps/3thJiKfzY1YQaxkY6 It's picked pretty clean, but we found a few chips (small pieces) with colour (as opposed to less valuable forms like "potch") - you just have to be patient and have fairly focused kids!
Not sure how active the surrounding area is these days. Mostly seems to be idle blowers (vac-based machines that bring material up from shafts) and mullock heaps. I think the heavy action has progressively moved up to other opal fields a few miles out of town.
The story I always liked was about opal showing up under UV lighting. They'd rip up material from shafts with blowers and pass it along a conveyor belt for pickers to watch with UV lights and grab at opal as it went by. Only issue was that scorpions also glowed... You can see prospectors talking about using this method here: https://www.prospectingaustralia.com.au/forum/viewtopic.php?...
Probably my favourite memory was a place called Grasshopper in Mintabie. The operators would blast in an open cut mine with dynamite, and then huge grading machines would drag the leftover scraps up to an area they let the public pick over looking for smaller pieces of opal. We were like birds showing up on a lawn after it's been mown.
Another spot was Concrete/Cement Hill. My little brother (5yo at the time?) had become bored finding nothing and decided to make a cave house for a caterpillar he'd found. While the rest of us toiled with heavy tools, he mucked around with this bloody caterpillar, and found two pieces of opal worth $500-1000 in the process...
Fairly inhospitable!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY2pvCldIi0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Cliffs,_New_South_Wales