I'm sure I could come up with a better subject, but I'm not sure what I'm dealing with here.
We brought a kitchen faucet in the states (a Grohe Eurodisc), and had a plumber install it. When he went to check it, the cold water was fine, but the hot is a trickle. There was no problem with the old taps.
Any ideas? I am so clueless with diy that I don't even know what to tell you guys other than the above! :-)
It is almost certainly because in the U.S. hot water is at mains water pressure and the faucet is designed accordingly.
In the UK, the majority of houses have hot water heated in a cylinder and fed from a tank in the roof. As a result, the pressure is less. It is becoming more common to install systems with mains pressure hot water, but not universal by any means. Therefore taps designed for UK low pressure systems have to have larger water paths inside or the effect will be as you describe.
.andy
To email, substitute .nospam with .gl
It's probably unsuitable for a low pressure supply. You even find that with some tapes bought in this country, so it's something you have to check for if your hot water comes from a header tank.
Probably designed for a pressure system, i.e. one supplied via mains pressure rather than a water tank, we had a similar problem with a German (I think) made unit once, the builder ended up installing a pump to raise the pressure.
Okay, I think I get it. Thanks for the replies, guys.
Now, if we install a pump (like the one driving our shower), would that be too much? Just right? Overkill? Blow up the house?
Assuming you have no intentiono of replacing your hot water cylinder, I would suggest making it the same pump as the shower. It is possible to use a pump to pressurise the hot supply to the whole house, if you get something like a 3 bar continuously rated one.
Christian.
I don't know what is on the shower, but I'd guess so. The hot water was never a problem anywhere else in the house...there's a bathroom off the kitchen, and the hot water in there is fine. Would pumping the whole house be overkill?
No. It would make showers much better. It will probably improve bath fill rates considerably too. The main issue is pump noise.
Christian.
Depending on your house design, it might be possible to raise the position of the header tank to give more pressure - as a DIY project it might well be cheaper than using a pump which is likely to be noisy - and also unreliable in the long run.
I'm surprised the flow is that poor in the kitchen, though, assuming you're not living in a bungalow. I've got 10mm? taps on my wash basin both fed off a header tank with about 15 ft of head, and they aren't too bad.
We already have the pump on the shower (yes it does make a huge difference), but it's not on the taps for the tub. I don't think. I don't know, actually.
But making it so that it pumps hot water throughout the house...would that be too much? Noise isn't a big deal, we're quite used to the noise, and since the pump is in the hot press, if we keep the hot press door and the bathroom door closed, it's not a big deal at all.
We already have a pump fitted for the shower. Moving the hot water tank for us right now would be a nightmare.
No, it's a semi-d. I don't know the diff of a header tank or ... well, how much head there should be (ugh, no comments there!).
OK, I've just recovered my memory of experiencing this type of problem in the US. I'm getting very old he say's as an excuse!
Some US taps have very small mesh filters the input to the mixer section. This can cause a problem with slow flow. Look to see if there is a fine mesh filter on either the input or the output of this tap. If there is, remove it and see if the problem goes away. I've seen this foul up the flow to a WHB to the point where it was unusable.
Regards Capitol
Not the hot water tank, but the cold water one which feeds it - this will probably be in the roof void, and easy enough to move - or certainly compared to a hot water cylinder in a cupboard. Moving it higher would increase the pressure/flow to all the taps - hot and cold - that it feeds.
The head is the vertical distance from the water tank (not hot water storage cylinder) to the tap.
Now something like that would make sense - like I said, I've got 10 or 8 mm fed taps in the bathroom, and they don't reduce the flow from a header tank to a dribble.
Ah, okay. It's already as high as it can get in the attic.
Got it. Thanks :-).
I looked in the tap, took the damn thing apart :-). There is a filter mesh in there, but I can't take it out, it's integrated. But it sure doesn't look like enough to slow it down that much...
Normally the mesh filter is a press fit into the tap assembly, can be difficult to remove. The only other time I've seen this problem in the US, is with a thermostatic valve which had been plumbed in with the hot and cold reversed. Hope this helps. ( IIRC, US Hot is left. If the tap originally was built in France, the hot connection can be marked C! (chaud)) Regards Capitol
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