Why the fuck are they so sensitive?

What kind of fucked shower knob turns counterclockwise

Australian, just like their toilets spinning water the other way.
USA checking in with one almost exactly like the picture
- Yeah I’ve seen plenty like this in the US.
Lefty loosey, righty tighty
- You know lefthand threading is a thing, right?
The ones at my gym.

In seriousness, it’s often about water pressure and how your hot water is fed. If you have very high water pressure normally but a solar hot water system where gravity and input pressure play a role, you’ll naturally have an imbalance on hot and cold. When you turn the handle on the shower you’re lining up two holes in the shower cartridge (in the handle) with the two hot and cold water pipes, the resulting mix comes out a third hole which feeds the shower head. As you turn the handle, one hole opening gets smaller and the other bigger- thereby changing the ratio of hot : cold. When you already have a huge pressure of cold water pumping in, the degree of rotation needed to go from warm/almost just right to PURE HOT WATER is minuscule. Usually the cold will stay pretty cold for about half of the handle range of motion too.

If water input pressure being high is a problem you can put a reducing valve on your system overall or you can buy Venturi style pumps which add pressure into your hot water system.

You’ll normally find when it’s pressure imbalance that it’s easier to balance the temp when the tap isn’t open full bore. But who wants a weak-ass shower stream!!

Observe while I shower comfortably with:

When I first moved to Japan over twenty years ago they were already about a hundred years ahead of typical US toilet/bath technology. For me, using one of these faucets where you can just set the temperature by number was like Liko getting beamed from her hut directly onto the damn Enterprise.
- Growing up in rural France, we had these at home for as far as I can remember. They may not have been the norm 30 years ago, but at least common.
- Interesting, so it adjusts the flow of hot/cold in the fly to keep a consistent temp? That's amazing, thought I imagine it would have the same issue I have at the end of the shower where it's on 100% hot just to eke out a bit more time
What's that called?
I really don't understand how this is still not the standard everywhere.. The cheapest ones aren't even that expensive and already way better than the alternative.. Don't think I've not showered with one of these in the last 25 years, except for in some kind of social housing projects homes.
Same man, it's been a dream since installing this.
- These things existe for at least 30 years, I don't understand why anyone would want to use anything else for a shower or bathtub.
Yes, but that is not a fair comparison, these are European.
- This technology is only possible with degree Celsius. It is impossible to adapt to degree Fahrenheit.
- Except British homes which have two separate showerheads, one fully hot and the other fully cold.
  The trick is to spin.

Okay I'm gonna be real. I didn't understand the meme at first and thought you were showing a melted door handle and the guy in the meme was trying to melt another door handle with his mind

I was fully prepared to read a bunch of comments about how are door handles so sensitive to heat due to their metallic composition and how you absolutely cannot melt things with your mind that the actual comments tripped me

- See this is what I was expecting thanks
You need at least the heat of your hand to melt metals. Or at least at least the heat of a cold but not cold wave winter day.

Weird.

I saw "melts tungsten" and my brain decided this was in German.

Fun fact: the german word for tungsten is Wolfram
- Wolfram alpha suddenly makes even less sense
Same lmfao
I think it's so late here that I assume Lemmy is sprechening Deutsch by default
Speaking as a Dane, I too had to recalibrate from "heavyrock" to "tungsten the element" 😁

Set your water heater lower. Like: make sure it's above 120 at all times (130+ preferably) to prevent legionnaire's, but 140 is PLENTY for most home uses. And it means you get a bigger range to move your mixer taps to.

That's Fahrenheit right? Or are you suggesting 100+ Celsius?
- Your water heaters don't have a "Steam Blast" setting? How do your bidets even work? Do they just dribble cool water on your anus? How weird.
- It's Kelvin
- Celsius of course. Only babies shower in 140 Fahrenheit!
- Last i checked, that would no longer make it hot water, but I use the dumb numbers where 212 is boiling
Came to say the same thing. Not sure why people want boiling water on tap. If I need to boil water I use my kettle, and save money by not heating a tank of water to near boil all day.

Probably American build.

Yep, if China had products at this quality and price point muricans would never shut up.

You should just move to a more tropical area. Where I live, I only ever use the "Cold" tap and sometimes, even that is too warm.

The cartridge is likely bad. They get clogged up with lime scale over time and start to perform worse and worse. Either replace the cartridge or the whole faucet itself.

Because it is hard to make a cheap valve that has a wide mixing 'sweet spot'.

Rich people showers don't have this problem

Nah, Brougham.

All the way to the left, then back off 1/16".

Burn me, baby.

A bigger water heater?

So there are lots of good answers, but there's one I haven't seen: The type of shower control in the photo is probably low quality, cheap, meaning the internal parts do a poor job of mixing the hot/cold water.

Adjusting the water heater may help, but you might also consider upgrading the shower faucet.

Come to Japan (and, so I've heard, several European countries) where we have a temperature setting on the tap. Mine caps at 40 by default, but you can press a little button and make it hotter if desired (up to however hot your water heater puts out).

My kitchen faucet is like this. It's one of those with single little stalk to regulate both temperature and pressure. Not only do you need to get it precisely right for the correction temperature, you also need to get it right for the pressure. Not far enough up and you get a little drizzle, too far and it splashes everywhere. And the stalk is kind of sticky as well, as you push it there is no movement until suddenly it moves. So making small adjustments is really hard

Lower flow temperature makes it easier to adjust.

Turn down the temperature of your water heater.

But that reduces the maximum length of your shower.
- And saves both energy and water.

i saw a comment on a meme like this that said some water mixing thing was broken

There are several possible causes to this problem, but that one is the most common.

I could've sworn there was a Seinfeld bit about the shower temperatures being sensitive when you adjust the tap but I can't find it now

- Yeah I really thought the bit would come up easily. I can hear his voice saying something like "a million degrees" or "hotter than the surface of the sun". It probably also started with the classic "what's the deal with..." that he used.

i can just turn the hot on and use that only. the water heater is so far away (have a walk-up, and it is in the basement) that the water is usually just about right when it gets all the way up here.