Unclear on the Concept
 

The bathrooms in the hotel I'm staying in (DoubleTree San Diego Downtown) have ceiling sockets for heat lamps. Some Wile E. Coyote-level Super Genius (tm) decided to save energy by using LED bulbs in them.

Well... kudos for staying there in the depth of winter. :)

I think I like this better. I hate bathrooms where you have to turn on a heat lamp to get enough light. I'd rather have all the sockets occupied by lighting that doesn't throw off heat, even that the bigger challenge with a bathroom is getting it cool after a shower. Sometimes when there's a heat lamp, the 2nd switch (operating regular bulbs) doesn't provide much light.

I'm assuming this is a hotel that was built before LED bulbs were a thing...

The amount of time hotel employees spend in a guest room is limited (mostly by design). In a perfect world, every maintenance worker would be thoroughly trained on every aspect of their job and no one would ever forget any part of that training. And, every replacement part would always be in stock. We don't live in a perfect world.

This might have been a simple mistake. Clearly, this bothered you enough to make a thread here. I'm curious to know if you also notified anyone at the hotel about the problem.

I don't drive but I wouldn't recommend risking anything bigger than a motorcycle to that exit ramp.

Since it kinda-sorta fits here, I'll mention that I hate bathrooms where the light(s) and the fan are on the same switch! Sometimes you need/want to be in there without having that noisy whirring in your ears.

Yeah, I'm with you on that too. I hate flipping that switch and it sounds like I just started up the engines on a 747.

It's not just one room that has that.

Being an engineer, I always have a few tools with me. One of the first things I do when I encounter a bathroom with a single switch for the light and fan, I climb up on a chair, remove the grill, and disconnect the fan. Most just plug into a socket in the fixture. I leave them disconnected as a courtesy to the next person who stays in that room. There are a couple of places where I've stayed often enough to stay another time in a room where I've disconnected the fan on a previous stay, and it's still disconnected. I guess it isn't high on the maintenance checklist.

The actual purpose of the fan is to pull humidity out of the bathroom after a shower. It's supposed to discourage mildew growth, which customers WILL complain about. I don't know if it works.

By the way, I carry a cheap plastic shower head, too, as defense against shower heads that are so clogged that you hardly get wet in the shower. But that's another discussion.

For me the fan serves a different purpose.

Back in the 1970s, older properties used heat lamps versus exhaust fans to get rid of moisture in the bathroom. I'm surprised a property that old hasn't been renovated yet still has a brand name attached to it.

Great idea, Mike! Can you send a pix, please? Do you carry plumbers tape also for the installation?

Shower Head Replacement
 

I assume you're not asking just for a picture of a shower head. You can find one like the one I carry with me at Home Depot

No plumbers tape required. They generally don't leak when they're just a bit beyond finger-tight. Sometimes they're so corroded (or the hotel's maintenance department was afraid that someone would steal the shower head) that they're really difficult to remove. There have been two or three times when I've been defeated. Some require just a little twist to get them off, others take all the torque I can apply with the TSA-legal size channel-lock piers that I carry in my "bathroom stuff" bag.
https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...d5a922f800.jpg


If you'd like to see a picture of me in the shower with my personal shower head, you'll have to be better at searching the USA Today photo archive than I am. One evening while on a trip, I was reading the free copy of USA Today in my hotel room. In the Travel section, they asked travelers about things they do to make their hotel room feel more like home, so I e-mailed that I brought along my own shower head and a pair of pliers so I could change out the usually clogged shower head in the hotel bathroom. The next day, I received a reply asking if they could send out a photographer to take a picture of me and my shower head for a follow-up article. I was going to be there for a few more days (the Embassy Suites in Arcadia, CA) and we made arrangements to meet the next evening. After a free drink, we went up to my room to take a photo, and darn if they didn't publish it. I used to have a copy of the page in the newspaper but it seems to have slipped beneath the surface here.

If anyone wants to try to search for the photo, I'm pretty sure it was in the edition around or exactly April 1, most likely between 1996 and 1999.