I would have found it quite reassuring during the great freeze if I have known the temperature of the water in the tank in my attic, and also the depth of the water in the tank.
I wonder if there is any simple wireless device that would give one this information?
Incidentally, I happened to be in Italy during the great freeze (it was only a little freeze there) and I was struck again by the fact that as far as I can see no-one except the UK (and Ireland) seems to use attic tanks.
Are they legally required in the UK? I seem to recall that it used to be illegal to attach toilets directly to the mains?
Nothing to stop you using a combination cylinder. That is a HW- cylinder & CW-cylinder "bolted together" and located in a bathroom cupboard or similar.
The downside is the height of the CW cylinder isn't much above the HW cylinder, they recommend about 3ft above the highest tap, but in practice it can be hard to get much above 1ft unless you go for a very tall combi-cylinder combination.
You can buy float switches re "overfull" if that's what you mean. You can epoxy a temp sensor to the tank, simple min-max thermometer with long lead. I suspect one watch to for is the ballcock outlet freezing, then problems really begin :-)
Probably. I'm jst going to hard-wire all the sensors for our place (but I've got the benefit of a big basement with no finished ceiling (yet) to run the bulk of the wiring through.
Well, I suppose lots of countries have single-storey houses (because they have more space so can make a home with a bigger footprint), and various countries do forced-air heating by default rather than water-filled rads, so there's less of a plumbing industry to make use of.
We've got a 2-storey place here in the US, but there's no pipework at all on the top floor; there's enough room to just do all of that at ground-level and use mains (actually, well-pump) pressure to 'drive' everything.
It's cold here - winter lasts a long time. First snow was back in October, and we'll be thawing out somewhere around April/May. I'd need some pretty serious insulation on any kind of attic water tank.
I monitor the temperature in my loft. That's also used to switch on the heating if it drops to near freezing. I don't think the tank temperature is interesting. It tends to be the pipes which freeze, having much less thermal capacity than the tank. The pipe feeding the ballvalve can be particularly vulnerable, and often isn't insulated well for the last bit into the tank. I've seen the result of freezing destroy the plastic valve components, so the valve then trickles continuously into the tank on thawing.
Why do you want to monitor the level? In case it goes too high, or rather low?
No. However, they are normally specified for business premises because if you lose the mains water for any reason, you are pretty much bound to send everyone home unless you have tanks that can keep toilets working. When you are designing a critical facility (in my experience, things like 24x7 datacentres), you need to size the tank to provide enough water for the minimum acceptable staffing level for long enough that you can arrange manual top-ups or alternative facilities.
As others have said, no. They're often tank fed because that makes the ball-valve quieter, although there are better designs nowadays which aren't so noisy with high pressure.
I think it's because we (or rather, the Victorians) got there first. At the time the mains wasn't too reliable, so a tank in the roof to provide a local head of pressure within the house made sense. We've largely stuck with it ever since because builders and plumbers are conservative beasts.
No. Plenty of people have mains pressure water - I do. The two routes are combi boilers, which heat water on demand as it passes through and make sense for smaller houses, and mains-pressure tanks which are similar to traditional tanks but are kept under pressure by the incoming mains instead of a header tank. Of the two I would think the combi boiler is more common at the moment.
The latter part is true, but I'm not convinced that tanks in businesses are the norm. The site where I work (maybe 3000 people) had to close for this reason last year. (It also provided a useful test for the Business Continuity folks's plans for epidemics or what have you - apparently it all worked fairly smoothly)
Don't think so. It did used to be illegal to use ones which employed a valve instead of a siphon, since a leaking valve would waste water. That went out in the 90s, I think, in the name of European harmonisation.
Back in 1986, in mid winter it didn't happen like that. The house was unoccupied for a few months prior to us moving in and it had got really cold. The wood burner and fireplace was out of service until chimney work could be completed in the spring, the huge internal mass was stone cold, there was no central heating and there were only a couple of external LPG tank fed gas fires downstairs a single 2kW electric fan heater upstairs with a 1kW strip heater on the wall of the bathroom. The outside temp dropped to around -15 deg C. The gas fires were run round the clock with the hall door open downstairs, and the fan heater ran all the time upstairs - despite that we were going mildly hypothermic at night with icy hair etc.
Then the hot water stopped coming through the taps (economy 7 immersion). Went into loft to check and we had 4 inches of solid ice as a crust in the hot water header tank, but surprisingly the feed pipe didn't ever freeze solid despite only a basic level of insulation with a single wrap of felt based insulation, the heat leaking from the airing cupboard below helped I suspect. The ballcock was full of slush though.
Had to use numerous kettles of boiling water to melt a line down the ice block, then smashed it with a lump hammer, hauled it out bit by bit down the loft hatch in a hessian sack and left it in the bath to 'melt' It was that cold in the house, remnants of the ice were still there nearly a week later - no one wanted a bath and we were well past caring on the odour front!
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