On 2025-12-12 12:21, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 11/12/2025 20:59, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2025-12-11 19:28, John R Walliker wrote:

On 11/12/2025 18:16, Lars Poulsen wrote:

On 2025-12-11, Daniel James <daniel@me.invalid> wrote:

On 11/12/2025 04:12, c186282 wrote:

... they just run lots of pipes on the outsides of the thick stone >>>>>> walls. Works, but you'd never get away with that in modern
commercial buildings. Things have to look all neat and tidy.

Have you SEEN the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris?

... or the Lloyds Insurance building in London, for that matter.

I seem to remember hearing that there was an English building code that >>>> REQUIRED outside pipes for water (and sewage?) so that they could be
easily thawed with a blowtorch when they froze in the winter?

No, it was only done to save money.

It seems amazing to me doing that in Britain, were pipes can freeze.
Now I understand the description of an hotel (Devon) in a novel I'm
reading (Ruth Rendell, The secret house of death).

I think the issue is that pre war, many many houses had no water, no
inside toilet, no heating beyond a coal fire no electricity and so on.

Hence they were upgraded to a water tank in the roof and some form of sporadic mains water supply, fed via something coming out of the ground
and into the house.
Drainage was often external - room size was small and the pipes were
just routed outside for ease of installation. And indeed access for
clearing blockages.

Retrofitting modern infrastructure to old houses is massively expensive.

My city is ancient, three thousand years, but there is no river. Well
water tends to be salty, from the sea; mixed often. I don't know how
they survived. I think the water in sufficient quantities arrived in
1945, from a river 170 Km to the north. So before that year, houses here
had no bathrooms, they were built since then as houses were provided
with running water. Yet, I have not seen that network of pipes on the
outside, except for rain water from the roof.

--
Cheers, Carlos.
ES??, EU??;

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