Water and Electricity

I recently received the alumni magazine from my undergrad college and it mentioned that a certain dorm had installed particular shower heads that would go off after a set amount of time and you would have to pull a string to get more water and this would in theory remind people to conserve water.

Interesting concept and it probably helps. Over here, the Irish are all about conserving hot water. There is a central water heater in each apartment and every night the hot water refills and then you get as much water as is in there the next day until it runs out. Which generally happens in the early noon hours. There is a boost button which hypothetically will give you a boost of hot water for like fifteen minutes but I'm not sure it actually works.

When we first moved in we didn't have hot water and I learned the lengths we would go to have a hot shower. My time in the shower dropped to under five minutes. I tried fooling myself that it was really warm but in reality it got significantly colder by the minute. I once tried washing my hair in the sink to minimize exposure to the artic water. As could be imagined this was pretty much ineffective since my hair gets exponentially thicker by the day. One of my roommates heated up water on the stove. Another one would shower at her friend's apartment. Basically we all made do and then after three tries, the hot water heater was fixed. I still get excited to have a hot shower every morning after those long couple of weeks.

The Irish also have a switch for everything. So if you use an outlet, you have to make sure the switch is turned on. This was more of a trial by error discovery for some appliances such as the stove. Now when I came to Ireland, I knew to bring adapters for any electronic appliance I would be bringing over. I had heard horror stories of people's hairdryers literally melting and as fun as that sounded, I figured I could live without having that particular experience. So far I have had no problem with exploding/melting appliances, but as I learned from the internet guy who came to help us out that if I didn't have the adapter, I would be shot across the room by the amount of voltage. Shockingly (pun slightly intended) I was okay with no electrocution during my time here as well so I have not tried to test this out.