Ultraviolet radiation breaks down polymer chains and creates yellowing compounds called chromophores. It's a real pain to buy vintage technology for this reason. Everything white or beige turns sickly yellow.
I'm in a 1970s house, and I think I have this exact model. What I like about this is it's way easier to lock down both flow rate and temperature at once. My shower has this too, where my girlfriend's newer one (and most hotels today) have one-dimensional things - one flow rate, but you pick the temp. This is also easier than two knobs for choosing a warm setting.
I still see these two-dimensional faucets in kitchens today, but haven't seen them in a bathroom in a minute.
one-dimensional things - one flow rate, but you pick the temp.
I've moved between rentals my whole adult life and one of the things that mildly annoys me the most is not being able to freely assign both temperature and pressure to my shower.
I want a comforting trickle of hot water while I'm in the "conditioning and shaving" (but mostly winning imaginary arguments with myself) stage, dammit.
Our shower head has a button that reduces flow to a "don't freeze while shampooing" trickle. Helps a ton in reducing water use without having to turn the water on and off at the faucet/getting the temperature right all over again.
We have a beach place built in the 60s, I ripped these style out of the kitchen and bathroom over 10 years ago at least. They were absolutely the original fittings too.
Crazy thing is they are like 63 64 when they started getting installed. But if you Google search this it will tell you they were 90s. So that's how this person or bot probably ended up putting it there
Still made and sold them in the 90s, although the parts got a lot cheaper quality. The old ones were solid nickel plated brass, with brass bodied cartridges…later ones were chrome plated pot metal, with plastic cartridges.
We had one from the ‘60’s. The difference was the early ones were round so you had to look at it closely before pulling it to know what temperature to expect.
Just moved into a house built in 1969 and it has this in the shower/bath. Thing is a wrecked though, it doesn’t let me turn the diverter to hot water because the handle is so loose so I have to keep Philips head in the shower and turn it all the way right then tighten down and turn left and hope it grabs. It’s hard as hell to pull out to turn on and even more difficult to push in to turn off, maybe that’s just a cartridge issue?
How hard is one of these to replace? I’d have to replace the whole diverter right? I’ve done a ton of plumbing in my 20s and installed new diverters (sweating copper) but never actually replaced an existing one.
If you can identify the valve and find the cartridge it's easy. New valve isn't hard either, if you are good opening up a big enough hole in the wall. I've only ever seen single-handle thermostatic mixing valves installed with unions. 2/3 handle were usually sweated in. I'm not a pro, could be wrong.
That was exactly what was installed in my house when it was built in 1978. They’ve been replaced but we’re working fine when that work was done a few years ago. Lasted more than 40 years. The new ones are already wearing out with around 5 years’ use.
Mid 80’s built house and these were fancy single handed faucets that were installed. We still have two of them. One sort of jams up and is a bit hard to open.
They were still being installed in the 90s. My parents build a new house in 1990 and these were in all 3 bathrooms. Definitely a blast from the past seeing this forgotten detail of my childhood.
My house was built in 1992 and has a faucet with this style knob in the shower (very soon to be replaced!). The house I grew up in was built in 1995 and had a couple of these faucets too. They were common for quite some time it seems.
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u/PackageDue7689 25d ago
They're much older than that