British Plumbing- why do we have a cold water tank?

was speaking to a brit this past weekend.  got on the subject of british vs american plumbing.  he told me that US & UK has the same mains water pressure (ie the water that comes into your house).  in the 19th century, the brits were afraid of napolean invading the UK and poisioning the water supply.  therefore, they made it law that all houses had to have a water tank in their house. 

this is the reason why british have cold water tanks, and that our internal house water pressure is dependent on that tank. 

is he right?

That's an entertaining anecdote, but for a start Napolean died at a time when few but the well-off had any sort of indoor plumbing at all.   In the early 19th century the threat of cholera and other diseases from open sewers and contaminated drinking water would have been far more worrying than the chance that Napolean's men might slip into England and poison the water anyway.   It was this problem which eventually led to the Public Health Act 1848, and the vast improvements in sanitation and water supply which followed in the late 19th century.   That's why such a large part of Britain's supply and especially sewer infrastructures date from Victorian times.

The reason for the storage cisterns was rather more practical: The water bylaws for London and many other cities mandated them to ease demand on the supply at peak times.   Imagine when everybody gets up in the morning and starts drawing off water for washing, making tea, using the toilet, etc., or the similar surge in demand which occurs when large numbers of people arrive home from work and start washing up after their day's toil, preparing meals, and so on. 

When the supply system is working at full demand, the pressure drops and the rate of flow to each house decreases.  The storage cisterns act as a kind of buffer, since they will simply refill a little more slowly than at other times.   In other words, you can draw water out of the tank faster than it's being replenished (for a limited amount of time, obviously), thus everybody can get their water but the supply system doesn't have to be made that much larger to cope with the peak demand directly. 

The cold tap for kitchen sinks was made an exception from having to be fed through the tank, to provide non-stored water for cooking and drinking.

The cold tap for kitchen sinks was made an exception from having to be fed through the tank, to provide non-stored water for cooking and drinking.

That's a relief. That tank has always worried me. I always thought of those things sitting up in the attic...getting stale and being pee'd in by mice and everything.

It's amazing how many cisterns don't even have a most basic cover over them.  They soon accumulate all manner of dirt, bugs, and general muck.  Dead mice and even dead birds aren't that unusual either where they've had access to the attic.

It's amazing how many cisterns don't even have a most basic cover over them.  They soon accumulate all manner of dirt, bugs, and general muck.  Dead mice and even dead birds aren't that unusual either where they've had access to the attic.

I remember a Fawlty Towers episode with dead birds in the water tank .

Paul-

How does every other country in the developed world manage to deliver water during peak times?  As an American who lived in England for 12 years andn Germany for three years,  I was always amaze at the antiquated, outdated, an inconvenient system of the English domestic water tank.  Taking a shower was like standing in the rain-no water pressure at all, unless, of course, you went to the added expense of installing a cumbersome electric hot water tank in your shower.   And I loved occasionally going up in the attic and opening up the water tank and finding a dead bird in it.   I always concluded that this absurd system dated from the days when the infrastructure in England was someone uncertain and unreliable to make sure the house had water during frequent water mains outages which probably occurred. It is, after all, England, where s-o-o many things seem to never work very well. But since frequent water outages are surely a thing in the far distant past, I conclude that the only remaining reason is: because it is England,  charmingly eccentric England, where so many things just make no sense. EG: gas pumps with no automatic shut off which means you have to hold the handle the entire time the tank fills. E.g.: train switches which freeze when the weather goes below 32° [ they don’t in Chicago, Moscow, Helsinki, Zürich). E.G. Train service which is severely interrupted by leaves on the track in the fall. EG crossed lines when making a landline phone call, IF the call goes through at all. I could go on and on.

You're replying to an eight year old thread.

You're replying to an eight year old thread.

I doubt it matters. Someone who signs up to a website to only to post a pointless rant isn't going to care much for common sense.