Cold Showers.

Well, no more of them, anyway.

Since moving into my new apartment almost 3 (!) months ago, I have had a very poor relationship with my on-demand water heater/central heating. These are generally the same thing in a Korean bachelor apartment.

How’s this work? There are pipes under the floor in apartments. Your apartment gets hot by heating, and then pumping through the floor, the apparently-not-safe-to-drink Korean tap water. This is all fine and dandy, except you also control when your apartment sends real hot water to the whopping 2 taps in the apartment.

This is also fine and dandy . . . until the labeling on how to send significantly hot water to, say, your shower, is not only in Korean, but in Korean jargonese that isn’t in dictionaries.
I finally found one way to make my water kind of hot for a couple seconds. This was enough to get myself wet, turn off the water, lather up while freezing in the unheated glory of my bathroom/laundry room, then turn on the water again and wait for it to get hot again. This is obviously not very satisfactory. And it took a widely-varying amount of time for the water to get hot enough to take a real shower. So now, patient reader, I am going to teach you how to take a hot shower in Korea.

I very strongly recommend opening the above image in a new window so you can look at it while you’re reading below.

Pushing 1, then C, then adjusting D to taste is how to control the temperature in my apartment. Everything else was the mystery. First, I discovered that pushing A and then turning B clockwise made my apartment, and (momentarily) my water very, very hot. I now have no idea why this function is here. The next discovery is that 2 makes the hot water bypass the apartment’s heating and send “hot” water directly to the faucets. However, the water is only heated when you are using hot water. This was most of the mystery. Then, I learned what E and F do. I think. When you push E, F regulates how frequently the room heats to the temperature dictated by D. I believe this is “per hour.” for example, if you have it set to 4, it will heat the room to, whatever temperature D is set for every 15 minutes, set to 2 means it will heat up every 30 minutes, etc. Or at least I think. I don’t use this, because I don’t use the heat a whole heck of a lot.

So, without further ado, here is how to take a piping hot Korean shower:

Make sure the light next to 1 is lit. Press 2.

Turn B all the way clockwise.

Turn the shower’s valve just short of full hot, and then pull the handle on until you hear the water heater turn on. Leave this small stream of water on for a few minutes.

When it steams up, get nekkid, and get clean quickly. The water gets less-than-satisfying-hot relatively quickly.