Plumbing here is not quite the plumbing most of you in the States are familiar with.

It is odd. Puzzling.

Segmented. Compartmentalized. Rationed. And not quite dependable if you live in an older building.

This is what I have learned about HK plumbing, in four months here:

1. The only hot water in many (most?) HK apartments is in the shower/bath. No hot water in the kitchen sink. No hot water in the bathroom sink.

2. The hot water is individual to your apartment. No monster water heater for big swaths of units — like you might expect in the United States, or even a major hotel here.

Your apartment almost certainly has a little water heater attached to a wall outside your bathroom — and perhaps even inside it. Before you bathe, you have to flip a switch to heat the water in the unit. Which often is tiny. Perhaps the size of a piece of luggage you could get into an overhead compartment in a plane.

At one apartment here, the one in Mid-Levels, the water was hot in a matter of one or two minutes, and stayed hot. At the Wan Chai apartment, where I have been for nearly half of my time here, the water needs at least five minutes to warm, and 10 is better. And you can count on the hot water petering out in, perhaps, five minutes, if your shower has any volume to it. So, yes, the water is going cold almost immediately, so don’t dawdle. Unless you like a lukewarm shower (turning to a cold shower) at the end of your hot shower.

3.  Water to toilets often can come from a source different from your other spigots. It is in the Wan Chai building, anyway, and it wasn’t built all that long ago. The records seem to indicate it went up in 1987.

So, you can have water running in the shower and the sink — but find that the toilet has no water. At all.

This was a recurring issue in my place for about two weeks. A day on, a day off. And it was fixable, but only if you took the top off the cistern and ladled in 3-5 gallons (or whatever it is) of water by getting it out of the sink, via the biggest bowl in the apartment, and carrying it to the cistern and pouring it in.

(And a creepy discovery here? By the time I got to the second or third bowl, the water was clearly carrying dirt. A lot of it. The water would run clear again, eventually … but I am not drinking any tap water in this town from now till I leave, and I probably won’t brush my teeth in it again, either. Though it may have just been dirt slipping in from the city’s work.)

Finally, this week, the water to the toilet went off — and stayed off. When it reached Day 3, I called the property management company. I was not the first caller.

The woman at the other end said that the previous hit-and-miss outages had been the city’s fault. They were tearing up things in the street.

But the current problem was a building situation, she conceded. “A line has burst somewhere in the building,” she said. “It is being worked on.” She hoped the toilet water would be back on in “a day or two.” Leaving me to wonder if the management company was on the wrong side of some law here, leaving a 10-story building that includes at least three businesses, one of them a noodle stand, without readily functioning toilets for half a week. Well, they functioned, but only if you worked at it (as described in the water-carrying scenario, above).

Finally, last night, the water to the toilet was back. And for the moment, all four segments of the Wan Chai apartment’s plumbing are in operating order.

The kitchen sink, with its cold water only.

The bathroom sink, again with cold water only.

The shower, with hot (!) water — but only if I remember to turn on the heater and don’t run the water too fast and don’t stay in there too long.

And the toilet. Which now refills itself!

I suppose, if I think about it, that if I were to install a washer inside the apartment (which is almost silly, given how common and how cheap laundries here are … but then again, they have lost about half my socks by now) … I would have to get hot water to that, right? And maybe that bigger or second water heater would generate hot water for the kitchen sink — for washing dishes, perhaps?

I bet it’s expensive.

And dishwashers? Not around here. Not as far as I can tell.

Anyway, I assume there is some sensible explanation for the way HK apartments are plumbed — water lines specific to certain fixtures, hot water only for bathing … but I can only guess at what it might be.