Hello from Romania. Young old person intrested in the past.

[nokia2010]

Hello. My name is Ştefan (or Steven, if you like).
I'm from Bucharest, capital of Romania. Borned here, raised here.
My passion for some old plumbing cames from the fact that I have a certain fascination for pre-1949 bigger apartament buildings in Bucharest (Bucharest is only one city in Romania that haves a lot of them; there are just few other cities that haves let's say more then a few 3 stories apartament buildings built in that period),
trought all that my dream is to live in a pre 1941 single house (so no neibghours attached to the walls) - I do live in a communist apartament building (quite o.k. building).
If on electricity domanian you can find for sale some forgein books published before communism, on sanitary and heating instaltions, I dind't found no big general one, except for a 1930 German one (hard to traduce, since it was priting using Fraktur alphabet). I found only one scanned catalogue. Fourtenley, up untill early '60's some of the pre-war stuff was preserved in manufacturing armatures and installations, so I can find some info on postwar books (in pre-communist Romania there wheren't to many tehcnical books published) some infos. But I want to find more. And I was amazed that building heating could be partially automated. Oh, I was borned a few years before fall of Ceauşescu, so some thing are still amazing to me, even if before 2000-2002 you could find very old stuff still in work here, but I didn't had the curiosity and the knowledge of what to ask back then...

 

[Maryplumb]

What is it you are looking for Stefan? At that time most of our domestic plumbing was lead which cannot be used nowadays and domestic heating was rare as we didn't have district heating systems on the scale used in Eastern Europe. Most people just had a coal fire, sometimes it heated the hot water via a back boiler.

 

[nokia2010]

My 1st inrerest where some kind of mono-command taps that I found in an around 1930 book, in German.
But I do have an intresr in the old housing instalations too. The way they where built (in Romania, 'specially before communism or the masive program of appartament bulings) and how much they will last.

I know that central heating wasn't use in such a large scale in Western Europe, trough all that some have district heating (and district cooling! in some cases).
But I do hate the dismantling of the heating units in old large buildings (let's say at least 30 apartaments) and replacing them with own individual heating units. I would have had taxed that. After all, it's a big bulding, not an individual house or a 6 apartemnts builing.

 

[Maryplumb]

If you are trying to fit old plumbing fittings you need to be careful of a few things, for example an old tap may look good on the outside but be corroded or worn inside. Our older heating systems worked by gravity and have been superseded because they were inefficient.

 

[nokia2010]

How they worked with gravity?
I know that some might be corroded. Depends on them... I had a no more then 10 years old new mixing tap. One day I accidentally hit it with a lighean (basin for manually washing clothses) and bang, up it went. I had without my will an artesian well into my bathroom. It was from some kind of Zinc, that why it was so weak.