– why can water taps provide very hot water but not very cold water

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We can turn our taps to easily provide us with hot water when doing the dishes, but if we want a cold cup of water we need to add ice – why?

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Sounds like a southern country issue. In Finland we get crisp, really cold water after running it for a little

Because they’re hooked to hot water heaters. The “cold” water is just the temperature of the water that runs into your house from your well, water tower, or city water connection. That’s why it’s colder in the winter and warmer in the summer.

They do make water coolers you can add to your system to make it dispense cold water, but it’s an extra expense, and an extra thing that could leak or break, and an extra tank where mold or mildew could grow and contaminate your water.

Your tap is just a valve, opening a pipe that leads either to the water supply from the mains or to a water heater which is fed from the mains. You have a device which provides a reservoir of heated water which you can open on demand but you don’t have a device which maintains a supply of chilled water to open. Instead there is just water which is room-temperature or whatever the temperature of the ground is (which is surprisingly stable).

The “cold” water is just the ambient water temperature in the pipes. If the ground is hot, the water will be hot because the pipes will absorb heat from the ground. There’s no refrigerator cooling the water. Hot water on the other hand actually goes through a heater to make it hot.

It’s cheaper to not refrigerate water, because hardly anyone cares about not having cold water. It’s quite rare to hear a complaint that the shower was not cold enough, for example. There is no real reason other than that.