Electric shower or not.

[mkb]

Hi all. Just having our shower room done up. We have a 8.5 kw electric shower which we've had for 4 years...it's great with no probs. Howerver it doesn't look great and we fancy the stainless steel looking shower with pipework buried in the wall...are they called mixer showers and do they work off our combi boiler ? With our present shower if someone turns taps on somewhere in the house the shower isn't affected but someone has said that the mixer shower could go hot or cold if people start turning taps on. Anyone got any advice ? Thanks,

 

[electronicsuk]

If you're happy with the performance of your electric shower then you may as well stick with it. Most people usually have the opposite experience with electric showers, and want to move to a mixer shower to get better performance. There will almost certainly be a performance increase if you go with a mixer shower from your combi boiler, as even the most pathetic combi is going to have a DHW output greater than 8.5kW.

If the electric shower is unaffected by the drawing off of cold water elsewhere in the house, you must have pretty good dynamic pressure and flow rate. The same should be true with a mixer shower of the same flow rate, but as there will probably be more flow required to run it, it's possible that using taps elsewhere at the same time as the shower might cause problems. Equally, due to the finite amount of water that the boiler is able to heat, especially with a combi, there will very likely be fluctuations in temperature when hot taps are used elsewhere in the house.