Nor sure how you managed to post your message at 10:43am - when it's only
10:15 at the moment! Please check your computer time clock (not that that has any bearing on your shower/heating problems!)
With regard to these, you will need to tell us a bit more about your setup before we can sensibly comment.
Where does the mixer shower get its hot and cold supplies from? Is there a boost pump? Assuming the hot supply comes from the hot cylinder, is this a dedicated supply for the shower, or shared with all the hot taps?
What type of heating/hot water system do you have? I assume that a single boiler (gas or oil-fired etc.) heats both the water (via an indirect coil in the hot water cylinder) and the radiators? Is it fully pumped or is the hot water circuit gravity (convection) fed? What zone valves (e.g. single 3-port mid-position diverter valve or 2-off 2-port zone valves etc.) do you have?
I have a mixer shower that I installed about a year ago. Worked great until about 2 weeks ago, when all of a sudden i could get no hot water from it. cold yes, hot no. The weird thing is that every now and again it seems to work. It never works in the mornings (the time thatyou want a shower!). But the later you try in the day, the better your chance of a hot shower. (when it doesnt work, there *is* hot water in the system.)
The fact that it worked for a year, and now works sometimes indicates to me that the is no problem with the hot feed, or a blockage.
As a side note, another strange thing that i've noticed is that turned off the central heating on the timing unit. But every now and again some of the radiators where red hot. I'd guess that either my house is haunted, or the timers knackered.
Any ideas on either of these, or could they be related?
Just curious, but why does this seem to cause a problem for people? Mozilla completely ignores the date stamp and sorts by order actually received, so I never notice unless someone points it out...
It's no big deal, but I sometimes look at the date/time stamp of a question before responding, to make sure it wasn't asked so long ago as to be no longer relevant.
In the case of the post referenced, I happened to notice that the question had apparently been asked in the *future*! I pointed it out mainly for the OP's benefit in case he needed his clock to be correct for other purposes.
[If you have more than one version of Windows on the same computer, the summertime correction will, by default, be carried out more than once - i.e. the first time each Op Sys is started after the clocks are put on. This could result in the whole thing being one or two hours fast without you noticing it]
Actually Lee, the answer you got was very civilised. You should try asking that question on some of the comp ng and see how quickly a flame war starts ;).
This message is timestamped at 19:58! Have a look at the International settings on your PC (Start/Settings/Control Panel/Regional and Language Options) and check that it knows that you are in the UK rather than in France or somewhere).
OK, we'll work with what we've got. If it's a gravity hot water and pumped heating system, it works like this: For hot water only, the programmer turns just the boiler on, and the water circulates through the large diameter pipes by convection. For heating, it turns the boiler *and* the pump on - with the hot water continuing to get hot by convection, and with the pump circulating water through the smaller pipes to the radiators. In theory, water will only circulate through the radiators when the pump is running. In practice, some systems continue to circulate by convection (particularly the upstairs radiators) even when the pump isn't running. The cure for this is to insert a "null-flow" valve in the CH circuit - which requires a slight pressure to open it. It will open when the pump is running, but but will stop convection from occurring.
Better still, convert it to a C-Plan (see
formatting link
) by putting a motorised valve and cylinder stat in the hot water circuit. This provides a boiler interlock - so that the boiler only comes on when required - saving energy.
Now to the shower. You say this has a dedicated hot feed. It presumably uses a Surrey Flange or somesuch, which takes water out of the cylinder lower down than the main feed to the hot taps? If for some reason, only the top part of the tank is hot - maybe the boiler timer isn't on as long in the summer? - this will draw cooler water from lower down, even though the ordinary taps are receiving hot water. If this is the problem, you need to make sure that the whole tank is hot - not just the top bit - probably by running the boiler for longer.
When this problem occurs, what happens if you turn the mixer to full hot? Do you get coolish water coming out, or nothing?
You've got the timezone set incorrectly. It's currently set on GMT, when it should be on BST. So, it's an hour fast (newsreaders typically adjust the raw "date" they display, to reflect different timezones).
When I moved into my present house, some twit had plumbed the thermostatic shower with mains cold but tank hot. Different water pressures from early in the morning to evening caused the shower to either run cold or run adequately. Perhaps (as others have requested) you post all the relevant details about your installation for better feedback to be given.
My thermostatic shower has filters on both cold and hot inlets. You have to take five minutes to dismantle the shower block (at the mixer) to retrieve the cartridge (I think that's the term) from the body in order to remove and clean the filters. I need to do this about once every year or so.
If your heating is off but the boiler supplies water heating then perhaps some radiators have been connected to that circuit? I connected one radiator in my property to the flow/return from the boiler. This meant that the radiator was active any time the boiler was on. I'll state here and now that the connection was deliberate, when in reality it was an oversight (now rectified :-).
Give more details of the setup - what kind of boiler, what kind of controls, pumped/gravity feed, how many separate tanks in your loft etc etc.
On Mon, 05 Jul 2004 13:25:33 GMT, "Red" strung together this:
Sounds like a blocked pipe somewhere between the tank take-off and the shower outlet. It could be worth dismantling the shower unit and fllushing out the pipes. Also check that the washer on the hot side hasn't lodged itself in the seat of the valve. Could be an air lock, but this will show uup when you try to flush the pipes.
Turn the mixer to cold and you get cold water. Turn to hot and you get a little dribble at first, but then nothing. I think i may have been wrong about the seperate feed for the shower. If you put the shower onto hot, and turn the hot bath tap on and off, it forces a dribble out out the shower. I can't see where the showers hot pipe comes from. It dissapears under some boarding halfway accross the loft.
The shower worked last night. But this morning back to nothing.
Appreciate your time with this. Any more ideas?
Thanks,
Red.
(PS Im posting this from a different PC, so maybe the time will be correct.)
If you have a tankful of hot water but it doesn't get to the shower, this indicates a blockage or air lock in the pipe between the tank and the shower - or something wrong with the mixer valve itself.
Presumably the flow at the other hot taps is ok?
Can you turn off your hot water by means of a gatevalve in the cold feed to the hot tank? If so, turn this off and disconnect the hot feed at the shower. Get someone to turn it on again and see whether you get a good flow out of the open pipe.
If you do, it's the mixer valve that's at fault. If you don't, it's the pipework.
If it's the pipework, do you have a means of temporarily connecting a cold mains feed to the open end of the shower's hot supply pipe? If so, do this and force some water back through the pipework and hot cylinder into the header tank (but not enough to make the latter overflow!). This should clear any crud or airlocks.
You probably have the "adjust for daylight savings" button pressed, so your computer isn't set for GMT, but for BST. If it was really set for GMT, it would be wrong.
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