Shower Temperature

I got rather good at figuring out how to do shower temperatures.

Single Knob controls: turn it all the way hot, leave it run until it's actually all the way hot (usually five minutes), then turn it down to the magic "just right" spot if you already know it. If you don't already know it, twist it about a fourth of the way along the allowed range, and wait a couple minutes. Adjust a tiny bit, wait a couple mins, repeat as needed until the "just right" spot is found. Memorize the spot.

Two Knob controls: turn the hot water all the way on, leave it run until it's all the way hot (usually five minutes). Turn the hot water down halfway and add cold slowly until it's the right temperature.

My old shower was a two knob, but it was tricky. After five minutes of running, it would appear to be done heating up, but if you adjust the temperature at that point every couple of minutes during the shower you'll need to change the temperature back down. So you have to wait another two minutes before turning the temperature down.

My current shower is a single knob, and it is the devil. The way single knobs are supposed to work, each spot on the run has a set temperature. The way this one actually works, it randomly decides what temperature it should be based on how much you moved it from the previous one, except it increases the change exponentially. So moving it too far, all of a sudden you have cold water in the middle of the hot side of the range. To make matters worse, no matter how long you let it run or what temperature you finally wrangle it in to, every two minutes it will randomly change to either hotter or colder. And how much of a change either way varies so much that you could end up with a workable temperature, or you could end up being scalded by the shower. Where the knob is on the range seems to have no bearing on whether it gets hotter, colder, or by how much.

Now, it's possible I just haven't figured out the trick of it yet. It's possible that I've just been impatient, and not letting it sit long enough between temperature changes. It's possible that the only thing wrong with the shower is that it shares hot and cold water with the rest of the building so anyone in any of the eleven other apartments could be messing it up for me. But I only just a few years ago got over my phobia of bathrooms, and the longer this continues the worse I'm going to have to fight it, and the more likely it is that I'll be so tense about the shower that I'll be unable to give it the time it needs to heat up and change temperature.

Besides, I swear the shower just WAITS until I'm actually under the water to change temperatures on me.

My wish- they would come out with Enterprise-like showers, not in space, just in temperature control. We tell the computer hotter or colder, and it remembers what temperature we like. It could start at baby-bath temperature to make sure no one is ever actually hurt by the water (seriously, there was one shower where if you weren't careful, you'd get burned by it).