New Shower Mixer

[carver]

Hi
I am about to buy a thermostatic shower mixer but have a couple of questions
1. I have seen a 3 way mixer to supply fixed shower, hand held shower and bath filler. Is it a good idea to have all three from a single mixer valve
2. There appear to be a couple of retailers on ebay selling cheaper (I assume imported) showers/mixers. I know you tend to get what you pay for but would I be asking for trouble getting one of these?

Thanks

 

[Softus]

1. I have seen a 3 way mixer to supply fixed shower, hand held shower and bath filler. Is it a good idea to have all three from a single mixer valve

There's no inherent problem with that, but I daresay that it's designed for high pressure supplies, so if you have tank-fed supplies then check that it is designed for those.

2. There appear to be a couple of retailers on ebay selling cheaper (I assume imported) showers/mixers. I know you tend to get what you pay for but would I be asking for trouble getting one of these?

Yes.

Tradespeople tend to buy from a limited set of merchants, not (as you might think) because they're all matey with the staff and get wonderful discounts, but because mutual loyalty makes it quck and easy to return anything that's faulty. If you bought 100 shower valves then you might expect a problem with a handful of them, so you can see that you could be lucky on eBay, but the impact of being unlucky makes the gamble unacceptable, IMHO.