If you have been reading the papers recently, you may have seen an explosion of anger about thermostatic mixing valves – the safety devices for taps that can prevent severe bath water scald injuries – with articles in the Sun, Express and Sunday Telegraph among others.
If you believe what you read, hot baths will be banned, you will be unable to top up your cooling bath with hot water and you will have to pay for inspectors to traipse through your bathroom every year to check up on your taps. And this is all unnecessary ‘nanny state interference’, as mothers can still use their elbows to test the temperature of their baby’s bath water.
In fact, most accidents aren’t caused by mothers placing babies in water that is too hot. Every year around 400 young children suffer horrific injuries when they fall into baths of hot water or play with bath hot taps. These children need repeated, painful skin grafts until they stop growing 15 or 20 years later, and they will still be scarred for life. Their parents experience a life sentence of guilt.
Because a young child’s skin is so much thinner than an adult’s, it can take just five seconds for a toddler to suffer a third degree burn from water flowing at 60oC from a bath hot tap. Yet water must be stored at these high temperatures to avoid the risk of legionella.
Given the frightening speed with which these horrific injuries occur, the best solution is to fit a thermostatic control valve to your bath hot tap. This will stop your bath tap disgorging hot water at temperatures that can scald a young child in just seconds.
Valves specially suited to bath taps in the home were developed by businesses in response to CAPT’s concerns about bath water scalding among young children. The Government recognised that it made sense to review Building Regulations in the light of this development.
The valve will allow water to flow from your bath hot tap at around 45oC. This is far too hot for anyone to lie in comfortably – and plenty hot enough to top up cooling bathwater. If you test the temperature of your own ‘steaming hot bath’ you will find it is only around 40oC.
If Building Regulations are changed, the valves will be fitted as standard on bath taps in new homes and in existing homes when a new bathroom is installed. There are no plans to ‘force owners of existing homes to fit the mixer devices’, although we hope that families will choose to have the new valves fitted, in order to prevent these horrific injuries.
On top of the human cost of bathwater scalds, it costs the NHS up to £250,000 to treat just one severe bath water scald injury. In contrast, the cost of fitting a thermostatic mixing valve when installing a new bathroom suite or building a new home is only £50 to £70.
It will be at least a year before the changes to Building Regulations become law. Before this, there will be a full consultation, and lots of work behind the scenes, to make sure that the changes will work in the real world. Some of the practical issues to resolve include:
the actual temperature at which water will flow from the hot tap – so we can prevent severe scalds and yet still top up a cooling metal bath in an unheated bathroom
how best to test that the valve is still working properly – which could be as simple as putting a thermometer under the hot tap
how to train plumbers and heating engineers so they can fit the new valves correctly.
If you would like to find out more about thermostatic mixing valves and their use in preventing severe bath water scalds, please click here to download our fact sheet.