Reducing hot water arrival time

[anta]

Hi all,

Our bathroom is about 20m from the hot water cylinder and it takes ages for hot water to reach the taps. Is there any clever way to reduce this? Obviously we can shorten the pipework as much as possible, and lag it, but is there anything else we can do? In particular is there an electric water heater which we could fit in the bathroom which heats up the incoming water but shuts off once the supply temperature is hot enough?

All help appreciated
Ant

 

[spacethegas]

you could get a pumped hot water circuit installed.

but that could be an expensive option.

 

[anta]

you could get a pumped hot water circuit installed.

but that could be an expensive option.

What's a pumped hot water circuit?

We appear to have a disfunctional gravity hot water circuit already but I'm not quite sure if that's what it is. There's two hot water outlets on the tank, one at the top and another a few inches down. The lower one goes into a pipe through the floor and comes up under the bath, and the upper one goes through the loft, down inside a wall, and they join together again under the bath. Potentially hot water will flow around this circuit all by itself. The confusing bit is this - there's a one way valve in the under floor pipe allowing water to flow from the tank via that route to the bath (ie backwards round the circuit so the coldest water goes to the bath!) but when the under floor pipe is blocked off (I did this once by replacing the one way valve with a gate valve and turning it off) then there's no hot water in the bathroom at all. therefore I assume there's another one way valve (or a blockage) in that pipe too. I tried looking for it but it's not in any accessable place - perthaps it's in the wall when it comes down from the loft. Any ideas on this setup would be appreciated too.

Ant

 

[electronicsuk]

Trace heating on the pipework?