Shower / Pump advice

[ambercelery]

Hi

I dont really know what I am looking for or what I need so any help would be appreciated.

(I dont plan to do the work myself but want to have a rough idea of what options I have soon)

My wife wants us to rip out the downstairs bathroom which currently has a bath and electric shower, and replace this with a fancy looking hotel style bathroom. We think that wet rooms look great but will be too expensive for us to do, as I guess we'd need to drill down into the floor and might encounter damp proof problems, so are looking for alternatives.

One easier route would be to get a shallow shower tray and big glass fixed window that you walk around to get in. To complete the look, she would like one of those big head "rain" type showers from the ceiling.
I dont think our water pressure is good enough so guess we would need a pump. The current bathroom is fed with hot water (from the tank in loft obviously) - and cold water - which i believe comes direct from the mains water supply (in through kitchen, and up above the ceiling and drops down to downstairs bathroom).
If we were to install a shower pump to get good pressure, would we need to use cold water from the cold water tank (i.e do we need new pipes) or can we use tank hot water and mains cold?

Many thanks

 

[JohnD]

if you use a pump, you must have Tank suppply water for both hot and cold.

A pumped Drencher head will use between 10 and 20 litres of water a minute

A hot water cylinder contains between 100 and 120 litres of hot water.

So your wife can enjoy between 5 and 12 minutes before the hot water runs out.

 

[ambercelery]

Hmmm, ok - thanks for that.. Maybe its back to the drawing board.
Doesnt sound very economical or environmentally friendly?

Do you know of any other options that do not involve being able to see a electric shower box on the wall? i.e. she wants the room to be quite minimalistic and showroom style bathrooms never seem to have a white box on the wall.(and no comments about I could have a silver etc box instead)

Are there any other systems available that dont use as much water as a shower pump but still look good and give a decent shower?

 

[Lower]

We have a large 'rain' type shower head, a salamander rsp50 and a 117 litre hot water tank. It works well, gives a lovely shower and lasts well over 10 minutes before it goes cold.

Its a relatively low pressure pump though so hence the decent shower length.

Don't write off the pump option until you fully understand what you're after.

 

[JohnD]

I happen to like a HW cylinder, nothing else domestic can deliver so much water so fast, and it fills a bath much quicker than a combi

But a Gas Combi boiler can give quite a reasonable shower - I suppose something between 5 and like 10 litres/minute max, previded that your water main delivers that much, and because it heats it instantly, you never run out. I don't think it would be satisfactory in a drencher shower head, though. You need to run your kitchen sink cold tap into a bucket to see how much your water main delivers.

However if you want to run more than one hot tap, opr shower, at the same time, the hot water from a combi is divided between them, so none of them gets much flow. This is a problem in a larger house. A Combi boiler delivers typically about 30kW of heat, whereas an electric shower might be somewhere in the region of 10kW. An immersion heater is about 3kW

It is worth knowing that you can use a combi boiler to heat a cylinder for baths as well as having an "instant" hot water delivery for showers. Mostly theyt are not installed that way because it is extra work and expense. A modern boiler can heat a modern cylinder in about 20 minutes, so you can have a bath as soon as the previous person has got out, towelled off, cut her toenails etc.

I am a householder not a pro.

 

[SUPERPLUMBER]

id agree with johnD, but to give you a wider view you could go down the route of an unvented cylinder heated by your boiler but delivered via mains pressure.

its a bit like the cylinder you have, but without a vent and instead of having the cold supplied to it from the loft, its mains fed instead. You remove the need for pump so you can offset that cost against the unvented system. They arent cheap though, depending on the size they are around a grand.

http://www.uk-plumbing.com/redring-...ting-cylinder-200-litre-lwss200i-p-51918.html

this one delivers 55 litres a minute.

alternatively you could get a wireless electric shower and put the "white box" wherever you like.

http://www.victorianplumbing.co.uk/triton-t300si-105kw-wireless-electric-shower-p-1583.html