Engineering work in public buildings : power, lighting, heating, ventilation, water supply ... / [Robert Owen Allsop].

  • Robert Owen Allsop
Date:
1912
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Engineering work in public buildings : power, lighting, heating, ventilation, water supply ... / [Robert Owen Allsop]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    CHAPTER XIII. INSTITUTIONAL BATHS. Bath work, in institutional buildings, is mainly confined to fitting up ordinary slipper baths. The bathing accommodation in hospitals is almost entirely of this type. Institutional bath engineering (so far as concerns the engineer) is, therefore, little more than an extension of the general idea in domestic work ; that is to say, the ordinary hospital ward bath is simply a suitable, modern house bath, but with most advanced ideas as to fitting, the demands of hygiene and cleanliness in working and invention are directed to ensuring safety in use. Special hospitals provide special bathing appliances; according as to whether the ideas of the medical superintendent incline towards hydropathy as an aid to established allopathic principles as fundamental basis, so more or less varied forms of local bathirig appliances may be installed. Such matters hardly affect the engineer, and are more strictly architects’ business. All the engineer is concerned with is the provision of correctly-working supplies of water, hot and cold, and his chief anxiety should be, in a sense, that of the electrical charge-engineer—to keep, so to speak, the line “ alive.” The introduction of a small pump into the hot-water supply circuit may be as beneficial as it proves for building-heating. An example of the use of this was given in Figs. 4 and 5. The arrangement shown is fully justified, inasmuch as a large and ramifying pipe system necessarily exists in water supply for large hotels, whereas the kitchens, being close to the kitchen calorifier, suitably generous pipe arrangement and diameters with a genuine flow and return render a pump superfluous. In Fig. 32 a block plan showed the forced hot- water system at Camberwell, the calorifier pump connection being given in Fig. 39. There is a tendency, and a wholesome one, to put these circulating pumps in public bath-houses. Many of the older public baths had not even a gravity flow and return. This worked well during busy hours, but, especially in the mornings, inconvenience was found. An improvement was the addition of flow and return, or at least of a small return to keep movement in the water ; but in most large buildings a suitable forcing pump is good practice. The system should be, for public baths, a lively flow in mains and main branches, short connecting pipes to baths, etc., without returns, presenting no objectionable feature. Much depends
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