Shower pumps - any good?

We have just inherited a house. It has a hot water tank and whilst downstairs is fine the upstairs flow is useless. The bath takes hours to fill and the shower is almost unusable. Would a shower pump be any good? There is space and power in the airing cupboard where the hot tank is. I'll get somebody to put it in but what power should the pump be? The house is a fairly standard 3/4 bed terrace. By putting in a pump would it solve the problem? Any suggestions as to which type if I am going down the right road?

Many thanks

Reply to
Pete L
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Check out the DIY wiki (wiki.diyfaq.org.uk) article on showers. A £100 Salamander from screwfix is reasonably quiet and will give you a good shower and much improved bath filling times, but as with any pump that has flow switches it'll make for a sudden kick-in spurt of flow when you're using the basin tap, if that's on the boosted supply. You'll also need to make sure you have a low pressure cold feed from the tank in the attic. Or you can boost just the hot and take cold from the mains (even using a cheap double-ended pump, with both parts parallelled up). Or you could go for something like a Pedrollo pump, Brio controller and expansion vessel from pumpexpress.co.uk for a seriously boosted hot supply.

Reply to
YAPH

"Pete L" wrote

In the past, consideration was given to raising the cold water storage tank in the loft. It may be possible/straight forward to generate 50% more head for upstairs users by doing this. This *may* significantly imrove bath fill time etc. Also it will mean that you are not running a potentially noisy pump every time you need hot water. If this measure doesn't improve things I would suspect that you have flow restrictions/poor pipe installation.

Then you just fit a pump to the shower. Be aware (particularly if you have kids) that a shower pump will empty even a largeish cylinder in very short order.

Phil

Reply to
TheScullster

Thanks guys. It's a real tricky one. The problem is that we are just putting the house on the market. I just feel a little guilty to sell a place to somebody and when they come to use the shower they find it is very poor. Every house I have ever bought I can't remember ever checking what the shower pressure was like. Each time having bought I had to put in a new system. Do I just keep quite about it?

Reply to
Pete L

Can't they test it for themselves when they come round to look? It's a small enough proportion of the cost of a house, ffs? And you might put in a brand new £x00 pump and they come in and rip it out and put in something else.

Reply to
YAPH

As YAPH said, Bathrooms and kitchens are the first things to be ripped out. Chances are the purchasers will fit an "efficient" combi-boiler anyway.

If the water is heated by electric in the tank with no boiler (cheap rate electric etc) then Personally I'd much rather have a dribbling shower that lasted than one that ran out after 3 minutes.

We have a place in Brixham which has got the hotwater tank in one of the bedrooms with an integrated header tank. The bath is on the same level and it doesn't cause any inconvienience with slow filling times. Not enough headroom in the bathroom for a shower so we have a tap/shower thing which also gives enough water to rinse off the shampoo and soap scum without spraying out of the boundaries of the bath.

Spen the money you were going to spend on the pump on paint and "pretty" things to dress the house for sale. That would be by far the best way to go.

Don't even mention the shower. It might be a "problem" to you (reason why you seem to change what previous house owners have been happy with), but you're not going to be using it. Let the new owners sort out things that are a problem to THEM.

Reply to
www.GymRatZ.co.uk

Thus spake TheScullster ( snipped-for-privacy@dropthespam.com) unto the assembled multitudes:

Well, strictly it won't *empty* the tank - it'll just replace all the hot water with cold ;-)

My Aqualisa Quartz shower has a flow rate of 12 litres/min on 'normal' setting, or 18 litres/min on boost (which I very rarely use). My hot tank has a capacity of 117 litres, so if we assume a 2/3 hot water mixture at the shower head I'm talking about depleting all the hot water in about 14 minutes. Normally my showers last under 5 minutes, so plenty left in reserve, but certainly with kids on board it would be a different story.

Reply to
A.Clews

Never make changes to sell a house based on your own emotional preferences. Sod's law says the purchaser will hate them.

MBQ

Reply to
Man at B&Q

des:

Specifically, it *will* empty the *tank* if the incoming flow rate is less than thre flow rate through the pump.

You *must* take the cold feed for the pump from lower down the tank than the one to the cyclinder so that the cyclinder stops providing hot water before the pump runs out of cold water.

MBQ

Reply to
Man at B&Q

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