Interestingly the cold pressure always seems fine, and running the cold tap doesn't result in a filling sound coming from the cold cistern of the combination tank. I infer then that either there's a mains feed onto the bath cold tap, or there's a cold water tank in the loft. I'll have to go and have a look. Would either of these situations be a bit unusual?
I suppose with a pump there's always the risk of draining the hot cylinder faster than the feeder cistern can be replenished?
What do you mean by "combination tank"?
Probably the former.
That is the cheapest way to do it..I rented an old cottage..and that was done that way..another one had its own pump to pump borehole water into a loft mounted tank..the water people came every year to check the quality, and assured me it was 'better than the local water board' every time.
There is, but its unlikely as that IS fed from a high pressure mains.
You MUST have a pump if you have high pressure cold feed as well. Otherwise you will simply blow cold water backwards into the hot tank, and no hot watee will ever come out of a mixing shower head.
Its a hot water tank with a small header tank on top. About 150 liters hot and 50 -90 liters of header..Awful things. No head at all.
Hmmm, on further fiddling I notice that the filling up sound of the Feeder Cistern of the Combination Tank decreases when the cold tap is running, so the filling rate will decrease when the cold tap is on. I think it's going to take a plumber to really sort out the different options!
Hmmm, which could be a bit of an issue with the hand held mixer that fits on the taps at the moment (pipe onto each tap which join to make one pipe that feeds the shower head). It occurs to me that it might be possible to get a bit more hot pressure by having a hand held mixer that has completely separate pipes going to the shower head, with mixing only occurring when the water is out of the pipe. Are there such things?
I'm starting to come to the conclusion that we may just have to live with what we've got!
Which is what one would expect. If you can't stop the flow of water with your hand through a cold tap chances are it *is* mains fed. If you can then it might be from a tank somewhere else in the property but I doubt it. Your options are
For a rental property then the pump or electric shower is probably the easiest.
Mixing the water outside of the shower head is a bad idea as you'll get hot and cold at the same time.
The message from DrF contains these words:
Possibly but unlikely unless you have a really powerful pump and a very poor mains water supply.
The same risk exists with a venturi shower but to a much lesser extent. The worst case scenario is that your hot water is so cool that you don't actually need to mix any cold with it and that is a situation that can never happen with a venturi which needs the cold flow to suck the hot in. It is also not a good idea to have stored hot water that cool anyway. ISTR that the recommended minimum is 60C but I could be wrong on that.
Having a separate cold tank would be unusal, however having mains cold to the bath tap would be quite common these days - so that may be what you have. If that is the case the the venturi shower becomes possible (these use the cold pressure to help boost the hot pressure).
There is. This is why for safety a shower normally has a dedicated cold feed taken from the tank. This is positioned so that it is a little lower down in the tank so that when the tank runs dry it is the feed to the hot cylinder than is exposed first - cutting off the hot rather than the cold. Some showers also include a thermal fail safe that ensures the hot is stopped as well should the cold fail.
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