>>>In the States you tend to have your central heating & hot water boilers in the basement, I guess. My house is on 4 floors - the bottom (basement) floor being entirely my kitchen. I had the CH boiler (what else would you call it?) installed in the bathroom where it would be a shorter pipe ride for the HW to the sink, shower and bath. Probably most people in GB have their boilers in the kitchen or bathroom.
>>
>>OIC. Here I think they're mostly in the basement, at least in the parts of the country that have basements.
>
>So not many in the New Orleans or Miami areas.
>
>Mind you, our boilers are quite compact, wall-mounted affairs - say 3' high X 2' wide and 1.5' deep.
>
>Not many houses in GB have basements. Sure, there are some Victorian houses with cellars, but for some reason our builders and architects (or town planning officers) have never had the sense to include this most useful of rooms/areas.

US and UK are countries divided by... Atlantic Ocean (Eddy Izzard).

What you call boiler and we call bojler (yep, we borrowed the word - want it back, now that it has a nice j in the middle?) in the US they call water-heater. What they call boiler is the big kettle for house heating. "Boiler room" is where all the heating related stuff, big furnace etc, is installed.

Note to Mike: in many European (and I guess UK as well :) houses the bathrooms were retrofitted. We had houses built as late as mid-fifties or even sixties which didn't have bathrooms. We partitioned our anteroom into a smaller anteroom and a bathroom when I was nine. Which, then, meant that everybody was trying to fit all that plumbing into as little space as possible, and drilling through walls (not hollow as here, but solid!) just to have the water heater elsewhere was simply out of the question. So the typical water heater is hanging on the bathroom wall. Even in our new house there, I hung it on the bathroom wall - though, on the other side, in a little engine room where the washer and heating valves are - shorter pipes that way. We have a total of about 3.5m of hot water pipes.

Q: why is a Yugo-cop sitting in a tub and not bathing?

A: he's waiting for the green light on the bojler.