Finally warm

Yes the British thought it ridiculous I left the heat on all the time in the winter. Even in summer is cool. One time it got to 88 degrees and the highways started to melt. When I was there many of the cottages had coin machines in them. You had to pay with coins as you used electric or gas.

ferret wrote:We were staying at my mum's sister's home where you had to stand on the toilet to feed a shilling into the gas meter to be able to cook a meal. Heat only existed in the kitchen from a coal fed fireplace.

No wonder they are no longer a world power

Heat in only one room was quite common all over the world in the "olden days", though. It's one of the reasons why a lot of older homes had so many separate rooms with doors, as opposed to the open plan living spaces we see today. Many of the rooms would be closed off in the winter, with the whole family living and sleeping where the heat source was.

My old house in Canada was like that. Although baseboard propane heaters had been put in at some point, there was still the old coal stove in the kitchen. The kitchen was a small, skinny galley style, with a door into the dining room, another into the living room, another to the staircase. We took out all the doors and the interior walls, opening up the space, which required putting in beams where supporting walls were.

We also found a mark on an upstairs bedroom wall under layers of old wallpaper that said "Snow up to here, January 1926." (I actually can't remember what year it said, but something like that)

It was the late 50's before inside toilets became prevalent. A lot of the water lines are over 100 years old and many are lead. Almost all of them leak but it rains so much in the United Kingdom no one is really concerned. My outside water faucet had a steady leak which concerned me. The landlord just shrugged it off and it was 4 months before it was fixed. I learned almost 40% of the water is lost through broken pipes and leakage. Don't think it is much better now.

Probably even worse here in Mexico......

In late spring, early summer, when the city wells start drying up here in Sayulita and they seldom send water out my way, I start sending the water office videos of all the leaking outside faucets, hoses, and pipes I see. :-) They have actually come out and disconnected the water to some offending properties or made them fix their pipes. Sometimes it's just a matter of putting a washer in a hose end, which the property owner is too cheap or lazy to do. Instead they tie a plastic bag around it, which does nothing to stop the leak.

When we first moved here (2012), I was told that the water pipes from Lake Chapala to Guadalajara lost almost 80% to leakage. That has since been fixed, which probably has had some positive effect on the lake level.