Moving a hotwater tank to the ground floor

[Nic]

Would like to move it to the ground floor to increase the size of the bathroom so that it will take a separate shower cubicle. Currently there is an electric shower over the bath. The house has ground and first floor, no other bathrooms, just a ground floor loo. The boiler is an Ideal Classic. Can I move the tank? How will it affect the water pressure in the bathroom, I presume it will? So what will I need to do to compensate for this or increase the pressure?

 

[peter anderson]

when you say tank do you mean the hot water cylinder?

 

[Nic]

Yes, sorry I do mean the hot water cylinder and not the water tank (cold water?) in the loft! This is all a bit new to me......can you tell!

 

[peter anderson]

I may be wrong here but I believe that the water pressure depends on how high your cold water cistern is (do you have mains cold water for your bath or is it supplied by a cistern?) so it should make no distance whether your cylinder is on the first or ground floor. The only thing is you will still have to work out what do with all the pipework from the cistern to the cylinder.

 

[ChrisR]

Just make sure the cold feed pipe from the CW cistern is fat enough. 28mm should be ok.

 

[AdamW]

Two things:

1) Have you considered moving your hot water system to the loft? Someone else asked about this here

2) If you want to increase the pressure to a shower, a pump or an integrated power shower (which is a pump in a box that looks like your electric shower) is the way to go. It would take a little bit more plumbing in your case, where the hot water tank will be on the floor below. To include it I would realistically estimate a day of work, possibly two.

As Peter mentioned, the water pressure is indeed dependent on the height of your cistern (known as "head") for both hot water and tank cold water (not mains cold water).