A friend wants to upgrade his bathroom on a tight budget..I am just fact finding.
Its a small one person cottage, and he probably wants to ditch his aging bath for a decent shower.
Currently he has a triton 7KW power shower thingie, which is barely adequate and looks ghastly. He wants it out. Then we revamp the tiny bathroom with new units tiles/light etc. It really is gloomy and ghastly and stinks due to water leaks, a dead rat behind the bath, and no extractor fan.. etc..
The hot water system is an oil fired Myson - about 15 years old - in a nice outhouse built against a chimney, and exhaust going straight up the stack via a 4" cast iron pipe and then I think a flexible lined brick flue..all done proper.
Really nice installation actually. Unless its raining when you want to access it. There is certainly room for any under-counter boiler in there, and plenty of width.
The central heating is a manifolded microbore system, and works well enough.
The hot water tank (about 150l estimated) has its own header built in upstairs in a bedroom with another small header tank above that..so two headers? presumably the CH is unpressurised and that's the basic cold water header. Water supply is excellent in our area. It has never failed all the time I have been here. No need for tanks. Pressure is at least
3bar..maybe more.My thoughts are that the cheapest solution would be to scrap the Triton, and install a pump downstairs in the bathroom to run the shower.
Do these things pump hot *and* cold together? I assume flow switches sort out when they are needed? Are they legal inside a bathroom? (no big deal to mount elsewhere)?.. I've seen prices in the £120-£170 bracket for positive pressure pumps..any ones to avoid?
The other option is to fit a combi and go mains pressure. I am no combi fan, but the low occupancy rate (one person, seldom more) and restricted space (there IS no loft. Rooms go up to the rafters throughout) make it attractive..it would also release bedroom space where the current mess of header and hot water tanks now are. But...
What would it cost? It's oil..how good are they? could we expect increased efficiency?. He's running on about 900 quid of oil a year.. Will the existing microbore CH stuff be able to cope with increased pressure? Ditto the HW/CW pipework? What makes to avoid like the plague?
His life expectancy is about 30 years (over 60), so solutions need only last that long. :-)
I am trying to give him a decent estimate of costs..particularly the opportunity cost of not using a pump, but stuffing in a combi..this is a long term attractive option because above the existing bathroom is a room off the main bedroom that would make a great ensuite bathroom for an elderly person, if there was room to actually hang their clothes in the bedroom where the bloody tanks now sit..bit right now money is damned tight.
His income as an actor and thespian, is irregular and highly variable, so its a question of planning in the hope that he lands a major film or west end run, rather than bit parts in soaps etc.
Any thoughts welcome.
Don't worry about the actual bathroom fitout..I have enough information and experience to cost that.
Its the combi-versus-pump costs that I need a handle on, and an idea of the complexity of fitting one.
TIA NatP