Hot showers in some countries: can you trust the wiring or will you be electrocuted?
So you have spent the whole day or more traveling across country, in dirty and dusty buses or without adequate chances to shower because you were camping or sleeping in your car, and you are in hot tropical locations where it would be so refreshing to finally take a real nice long hot shower. You book a room for the night with a private bath and are anticipating the shower as it is was a tryst with a long lost mate. You crank up the knobs and the water pressure is powerful, but just as you step inside the shower you notice some really whacky looking electrical work around the shower head and you begin to have serious second thoughts about putting your toe into the water, because you have seen enough movies and read enough novels about electrocution by having a gadget like a radio or hair drier fall into a bathtub. Plus, others have warned you since you were just a little kid about the possibility it could happen to you and fry you to a crisp with your hair standing on end. That is the same reason why near kitchen sinks or in bathrooms in places like the USA, it is a building inspector code - now always enforced - that electrical outlets have to emergency shut off mechanisms to prevent death by jolting 110 or 220 voltage.
Here is the deal: in many places where they can’t afford fancy hot water systems, they just put a little electrical gadget on the shower head and it heats the water as it travels through the shower head, making it at least warm enough to be comfy and sometimes making it actually very nice and steamy. But the wiring job often involves some simple red and black wire and lots of cheap black electrical tape. There is water everywhere, so the possibility does exist for getting shocked if the wires aren’t properly grounded or are exposed. What to do? Well, that depends on your level of risk versus your level of wanting a nice shower, most of the time. If you are not an experienced electrician, you wind up trusting fate in most cases. They wouldn’t have the gadgets if people got killed all time, right? Personally this writer avoided the first one and then used others for months on end, and only once did he get a little buzz from the water…not enough to hurt, just enough to make him feel juiced up without drinking espresso.