Focus on Mexico Blog

Living in Hot Water in Lake Chapala

(Karen McConnaughey, Living in Mexico) Permanent link

by Karen McConnaughey 

72 liters of waterOne thing you’ll find out when you move to Mexico is that when you fix, repair or change ‘something,’ it will generally impact something else you might not have even thought about. We learned that when we got a pressurized water system for our house. I was tired of my little dribbling sink water and it seemed to take forever to do one load of laundry. Did I tell you we lived in a small Mexican village? So we decided to install a pressurized system. Great, right? Life will be perfect.

Our first adventure with the new system was taking a shower using our 20-liter hot water heater.  A shower…hot water, then immediately cold water. Oh yeah…pressurized system, water gone quickly! Off to the ferreria (hardware store) to get a new hot water heater…a really big hot water heater…72 liters. Sometimes Bill and I are such hayseeds…the minute it was installed, we waited an appropriate amount of time, and I got my request in first, “I’m going to take a shower!” Bill was surprised…As the man, I think he expected to be first. Not being the first can be upsetting to a man’s psyche. At that moment I didn’t care…I went first! It was such a lovely, wonderful, pressurized, long, hot shower that I really tried to stay in there to see how long it would be until the water ran cold. It never happened. Bliss. When I went into the living room, Bill immediately jumped up and said, “How was it?” I just smiled and said, “I never ran out of hot water.” He immediately had to try it and came out long afterward with the same silly smile on his face. Life was really perfect now!

A perfect life indeed...