I originally posted here in 2007 about our shower running too cold.
Now the story begins....
For the last year or so since the post here we had a perfectly workable solution in that if you didn't turn the shower on full tilt you got a nice warm shower, open the valve to full though and you always got too much cold water.
Within the last few months we were having increasing problems of the shower running too cold no matter what you did. The valve also stopped working in a linear fashion, you would have to open to nearly full before a flow came leaping out but could then reduce flow by slowly moving the handle back towards the off position.
In an attempt to reduce the cold we had a PRV installed last month in the cold supply pipe under the bath which serves the bath cold tap and the shower cold feed. (A pressure check revealed that water from the boiler was coming in at 1.5 bar and the cold off the main was at 5 bar!!).
Since then we have the opposite problem in that the shower runs too hot with barely any cold. This is despite the cold being set at a slightly higher pressure than the hot and coming gushing out the bath tap. (When the plumber was calibrating the PRV he set it at the same as the hot pressure, but this didn't generate much cold flow in the shower so he just upped the pressure slightly, however this made the cold flow "jump" i.e. nothing and then loads of cold water).
I wondered if the valve was sticking so bought some circlip pliers, took the shower valve out and cleaned off some minor scaling with a water/vinegar mix. (The components that were removed were the Spring, Piston & Spring Assembly, Thermostatic Cartridge and the ASF(? whatever that stands for!))
After rinsing everything I reinstalled it, turned the temperature to the lowest setting and turned the shower on. A nice flow of cold water (but still at much less pressure than it should be given the amount of water than can still come out the bath tap having negotiated the PRV). Turned the temp knob to add hot and calibrated the temperature at 38 deg C thinking the job was done. Had a shower this morning - piping hot again without changing the temperature from the previous night!! (Don't think the Anti-Scald is working either......)
Only way to get it to work is to uncalibrate the temperature knob and turn the shower all the way back to cold only, drop the shower head to below the tap height, wait for the cold flow to come back, raise the head back to the holder and then add hot back in. Far from ideal.
So any ideas out there as to what could still be wrong?
Could there be a problem inside the ASF as I didn't take this component apart?
Tearing my hair out as we used to have an amazing, warm and powerful shower, and now it's atrocious.
As you can tell from the ramble above I'm stumbling in the dark, but hope all the symptoms described will help in diagnosing the problem.
Shower is a "Home of Ultra" Beaumont Dual and looks similar to this:
Niall
Now the story begins....
For the last year or so since the post here we had a perfectly workable solution in that if you didn't turn the shower on full tilt you got a nice warm shower, open the valve to full though and you always got too much cold water.
Within the last few months we were having increasing problems of the shower running too cold no matter what you did. The valve also stopped working in a linear fashion, you would have to open to nearly full before a flow came leaping out but could then reduce flow by slowly moving the handle back towards the off position.
In an attempt to reduce the cold we had a PRV installed last month in the cold supply pipe under the bath which serves the bath cold tap and the shower cold feed. (A pressure check revealed that water from the boiler was coming in at 1.5 bar and the cold off the main was at 5 bar!!).
Since then we have the opposite problem in that the shower runs too hot with barely any cold. This is despite the cold being set at a slightly higher pressure than the hot and coming gushing out the bath tap. (When the plumber was calibrating the PRV he set it at the same as the hot pressure, but this didn't generate much cold flow in the shower so he just upped the pressure slightly, however this made the cold flow "jump" i.e. nothing and then loads of cold water).
I wondered if the valve was sticking so bought some circlip pliers, took the shower valve out and cleaned off some minor scaling with a water/vinegar mix. (The components that were removed were the Spring, Piston & Spring Assembly, Thermostatic Cartridge and the ASF(? whatever that stands for!))
After rinsing everything I reinstalled it, turned the temperature to the lowest setting and turned the shower on. A nice flow of cold water (but still at much less pressure than it should be given the amount of water than can still come out the bath tap having negotiated the PRV). Turned the temp knob to add hot and calibrated the temperature at 38 deg C thinking the job was done. Had a shower this morning - piping hot again without changing the temperature from the previous night!! (Don't think the Anti-Scald is working either......)
Only way to get it to work is to uncalibrate the temperature knob and turn the shower all the way back to cold only, drop the shower head to below the tap height, wait for the cold flow to come back, raise the head back to the holder and then add hot back in. Far from ideal.
So any ideas out there as to what could still be wrong?
Could there be a problem inside the ASF as I didn't take this component apart?
Tearing my hair out as we used to have an amazing, warm and powerful shower, and now it's atrocious.
As you can tell from the ramble above I'm stumbling in the dark, but hope all the symptoms described will help in diagnosing the problem.
Shower is a "Home of Ultra" Beaumont Dual and looks similar to this:
Niall
