Has anyone any experience/opinions of the thermostatic mixer showers sold by Screwfix? They have a Pegler Mimo at £99 and an unbranded bar mixer at £59. They seem much much cheaper than brands I have heard recommended (Hansgrohe,Mira,Aqualever)
What about the ones sold by B&Q (I saw a Tapmate one in store for £79, also gainsborough ones are quite cheap) and Wickes (Aqualiss), any good?
Any opinions would be much apppreciated.
I have the cheap bar mixers in both of my showers at home; they performed well but recently the thermostats failed in both of them after about 4 years; fortunately they were under a 5-year warranty so Sfix replaced both (and the new ones work fine too).
Again unbranded; can't guarantee the manufacturer (and quality) is the same as the old ones. They look very similar but are not identical. Also I suspect the 5-year warranty doesn't apply to the new (ie current) ones (odd, that!)
I always think that showers are like shoes - you buy the best you can afford
The cheap bar mixers are fine, provided you feed them with soft (or phosphate dosed) water. If you don't, they scale up in about a year or two and can't be disassembled for descaling.
Christian.
You don't have to disassemble them to descale them. Simply, fill them with a
50% solution of vinegar and water for 30 minutes.
This seems to work well on a combi (with the usual 'water softener' proviso...)
I that, and it failed. I suppose the issue might not have been scale, although I suspect it was.
Christian.
Did you also descale your shower head? The scale in the holes is sometimes imperceptible. Use a wire, such as a paper clip, which is a snug fit, to clean these holes.
The unbranded mixer in Screwfix looks like one bought ( for £90! ) from Homebase. It works fine, but a word of warning. Due to the cranked pipe adapters supplied with it, it was necessary for me to channel out the bricks in my wall to have the supply pipes set sufficiently far back so as to be able to mount the mixer flush with the wall. I see for a little extra Screwfix supplies standoff thingies for this shower, so that you can mount it projecting out of the wall slightly so as to avoid the need to recess your supply pipes back into the wall bricks. If you buy the bar mixer be sure to get the standoffs with it and save yourself a world of annoyance and work...
Andy.
The shower head was clean, helped by a pin-clean system that reams out all the holes automatically. A very worthwhile upgrade to the cheap head that came with the mixer.
Christian.
Well I thought everybody discarded the cranked adapters.....
If you have to increase from 1/2" to 3/4" and are short of space behind suggest adapting perpendicular to the shower. More seriously if maintenance access behind is diffficult which it is likely to be I recommend having no inaccessible screwed connetions ie ditch the adapters.
Jim A
Bear in mind that the further you have it projecting from the wall, the less strength it will have it someone uses it as a handle etc. Buried into the wall a bit, you can arrange for better support to the unit. Also, I noticed that the chrome standoff units were expensive enough to make the overall unit purchase not quite so cheap ! However, the cranked adapters can certainly be more trouble that they are worth ! Simon.
Some of those fancy shower heads actually impede the flow on gravity fed showers.
Yes, which is why I would not consider a gravity fed shower in a million years. They're a complete waste of time, unless you can put the tank at least 10m (and preferably a lot more) above the shower head.
Christian.
That is not so, my tank is exactly 1 metre above the gravity fed shower head and works brilliantly. You can buy shower mixer valves which are designed to work on a head of .5 of a metre.
It depends on what you expect from the shower. If you like the "soft water" type head setting, then low pressure is fine and can even provide good flow rates with careful design of the hot water system.
However, if you like the lowish flow, but high speed blast type settings, or the pulsed massage, then it is simply physically impossible to provide this without increased pressure. To get the required droplet velocity, through the small holes does require a push. The push requires pressure, at least 1 bar (10m).
Christian.
Yes, I found the adapters a real pain, and a another poster commented, it is bad practise to have them inaccessible ( mine are behind tiles ! ) as they can be prone to move when you tighten the mixer bar onto them - you have no way of knowing whether their seals are still watertight since they are behind the tiles.
Perhaps I should not have used them, but my waterpipes for the shower were
1/2" not 3/4", so wouldn't fit directly into the bar mixer, and they were spaced the wrong distance apart. The cranked adapters allowed me to use the original pipes, but as I found out, spawned the additional problems of leaving the bar mixer too far off the wall, and with inaccessible joints ( I used liquid PTFE on them in the end, as they were prone to leaking ). I reckon I'd have been better off as suggested, discarding the adapters and somehow soldering 3/4" pipe onto the 1/2" pipe and spacing them out omehow. Not easy as they pipes were behind a tiled surface which I had no spare tiles for.Andy.
This is what I did on the one I'm currently fitting
Neat! Wish I'd thought of that when I did the same job... I think the above link should go into the FAQ.
David
The triton shower I am doing is overkill. I'm fixing at the back with tap elbows to the chased out wall, and to an aluminium plate on the front of the bricks via the panel mount option, which is nuts on the outside of the 1/2-3/4 straight adapter. I think it will be indestructable. I just have this image of somebody slipping and grabbing the bar as handle. Simon.
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