Shower pressure

csubo78 · Posted: Tue Jul 17, 2007 10:22 am Post Subject: Shower pressure

I have just had my bathroom refurbished, as well as getting a new en-suite created. The result of this is that all the old components have been replaced with new ones, and I also have an extra sink, shower and toilet.

Previously, my shower (some kind of mixer combined with the bath taps) was pretty powerful. My new shower - a thermostatic mixer shower separate to the bath taps - is very weak

Obviously there are more things plumbed in to share the water now, but the shower is weak even when nothing else is switched on. If I switch on a basin tap, it almost stops completely. Should the extra units be affecting my shower when they are not in use, or does it sound like I have a problem with the new plumbing?

My shower is a \\\"Techno 95 single function shower kit\\\" from bathstore.com, apparently suitable for 0.1 bar minimum.

It may be worth noting that the plumbers switched off my boiler or closed the valves at some point, so perhaps it could be possible that they didn\\\'t re-open them completely? My boiler is a Valliant EcoMax 828/2 E. Should this be able to cope with my 2 bathrooms?

I would appreciate any advice you give, thanks!

gas4you · Posted: Tue Jul 17, 2007 4:13 pm Post Subject:

The Ecomax 828 will cope with ant one hot outlet at a time.

Check under the boiler that the cold inlet is fully opened.

__________________
Dave
DRL Gas Services

csubo78 · Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 11:26 am Post Subject:

Thanks for the tip. I played about with the cold water inlet but it didn't seem to help much - i think the flow might be a tiny bit better but it's not what i was used to before. It's difficult to compare because of the new appliances, but the shower head is nothing fancy so should be similar to before i would have thought, and the taps etc don't seem particularly powerful.

The kitchen, which hasn't changed at all, still seems to get good pressure - i.e. the water really blasts out of the taps. I can't get a similar effect in the bathroom - the rate is acceptable (but not great) from the taps, and probably verging on acceptable for the shower (if i didn't know how good it was before!)

Is there anything else simple that I can check? I guess there must be ways of measuring the pressure using a meter at different points in the system?

gas4you · Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 6:08 pm Post Subject:

One would have to wonder if the bathroom installers fitted isolation valves to the shower supplies and either they are not fully open or they have used 'ball-o-fix' type valves instead of full bore valves.

__________________
Dave
DRL Gas Services