Hot water dissolves lead more quickly than cold water and is therefore more likely to contain greater amounts of lead. Never use water from the hot water tap for drinking, cooking, or making baby formula.
Hot water dissolves lead more quickly than cold water and is therefore more likely to contain greater amounts of lead. Never use water from the hot water tap for drinking, cooking, or making baby formula.
That’s only true in America, where your Health and Safety Standards are shit.
Might be true in parts of Africa and China too, along with other places with a bad standard of human rights.
It’s still legal for plumbing parts that contain lead to be used here in Australia.
It was supposed to be banned last year but they extended the dead line twice because the plumbers were crying.
It’s now meant to be fully phased out in May 2026.
There may be more lead in your country than you think, even if lead pipes are banned.
Multiple schools here have had lead found in their water. It’s crazy.
Growing up in the US I learned this exact thing was why there were two taps in the UK instead of a shared tap. That and Legionnaires growing in the hot tanks.
Yeah that’s not been true for about 50 years.
We replaced all our lead, and it’s a legal requirement to if you find a lead pipe in a system, replace it no matter what (even in listed buildings) or disable the outputs entirely (the latter is more common in VERY OLD buildings, with people then adding a new system somewhere else, sometimes with exposed pipework rather than having to potentially damage walls.)
We also just don’t do hot water tanks any more usually, instead doing on-demand boilers.
Does mean that the hot runs cold for about a minute, but it balances out
The hot runs cold for a minute with a tank too. It takes awhile for it to reach the tap.