Coverage and Its Limits

Routing and coverage

We route to independent contractors who cover a given ZIP code. Coverage is not uniform — a state we cover well in one metro may have gaps elsewhere in it. If nobody covers yours we will say so on the call rather than take your details and leave you waiting.

The town pages we planned and did not build

This site was scheduled to carry a page for each of several thousand towns, and there was a figure lined up to put on them: the Census Bureau publishes the number of bedrooms in the housing stock of a given area, and bedroom counts track bathroom counts, and bathroom counts track how many shower valves a house has.

Read that sentence again and count the assumptions. It is a proxy for a proxy. A page whose local content is "homes here have a median of three bedrooms, so many of them probably have more than one bathroom" tells a reader in that town nothing they can act on, and it would have been the thinnest thing we publish.

So we did not. There is no dataset that counts shower valves, none that counts valve types, and none that counts faults. Where the data does not support a page, the page does not get written.

What holds everywhere

The standard, which applies identically everywhere: the three types of compensating valve and the limit stop that is supposed to be set on every one of them. The faults, which are the same in every state. And the one thing that genuinely does vary — the maximum temperature your local code mandates — told as something to look up rather than guessed at on your behalf.

Source: ASSE International, Adjustment of Automatic Compensating Valves to Prevent Potential Scald Hazards.

• The limit stop
• Type P or Type T