kayelbe

25th Oct 2021

Groundhog Day (1993)

Question: Phil asks the landlady at the hotel if there is any hot water, and she laughs and says there wouldn't be any today. Why wouldn't there be any hot water? Wouldn't the hotel have boilers?

Answer: In a lot of old hotels those days used water heaters instead of boilers. A water heater has a limited amount of water heated, stored in a tank. So at the end of the week and every guest showering and using hot water during that week, the hot water will be gone before they refill the water heater at a specific day.

lionhead

That's not how hot water heaters work. The water temperature is maintained by a thermostat. Once empty, it would take time to heat the refilled tank-but it's not heated on a specific day. The other answer is more correct.

kayelbe

Answer: Her laughter seems to imply that the rooms never have hot water when it's as cold as it was that day; maybe the pipes freeze, or her boiler just isn't very good. This isn't a five-star hotel, it's a small B&B run, it seems, solely by Mrs. Lancaster. Maybe she hasn't gotten around to fixing/arranging to fix whatever is wrong with the hot water, or it's just not something she sees as a big problem.

Join the mailing list

Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.