Blutide Rip
The Blutide Rip range
Rip is a working range rather than a designer one, and it is a short page: eight products, all listed in polished chrome. Where most Blutide ranges are built around a matching basin, bath and shower suite, Rip is weighted towards the basic plumbing fittings that go into laundries, garages, outside walls and back-of-house work. Two bib taps, a pillar tap and an under-tile stop tap make up half of it. Worth knowing before you specify it as a bathroom suite, because it is not really one.
Bib taps and pillar taps explained
A bib tap is wall-mounted and single-temperature: the body sits against the wall and the spout projects straight out of it, which is what you want over a wash trough, in a laundry or on an outside wall for a hose. Rip has a standard 15mm bib tap and an extended version, which has a longer body so the outlet still clears the wall face once plaster and tile have added depth. A pillar tap is the deck-mounted equivalent, fitted into a tap hole in the basin or sink itself, and because each one carries a single temperature they are normally fitted as a hot and cold pair in a two-tap-hole basin.
The under-tile stop tap
The Rip Tide 15mm under-tile stop tap is an isolating valve, not an outlet. It is plumbed into the supply line and set into the wall behind the tile face, with 15mm compression connections on both sides, so water to a particular fitting or run can be shut off without closing the main to the whole house. Fitting one where a shower or basin feed is accessible saves a great deal of aggravation the day a cartridge needs attention.
The mixers, and where to look next
The remaining four products are mixers: a wall-type bath mixer, a wall-type sink mixer, a one-hole kitchen mixer with a J spout, and a basin mixer with a swivel spout. All four are chrome, like the rest of the range.
Rip products also appear on the wider Blutide taps, kitchen mixers, bath mixers and shower mixers pages, which are the better places to compare options. The full brand sits under Blutide.