Shower Pump Problems

[parkview094]

Hi,
We've recently moved house and the new place has a pumped shower. It's always been noisy and never offered a great deal of pressure, but had some odd behaviour this morning..

1. Pump always starts with a reasonable pressure then audiably begins to whine and the pressure drops a little.
2. Today - whilst showering, the hot cut out completely - no audiable change in the pump. Turned the shower off and on again, plenty of hot water again. This happened twice.
3. When the mixer control is turned off, the pump continues to run for some time. When I finally got out the shower, the pump continued to run for probably a good 40-50 seconds.

Is this likely just a knackered pump, or is there anything else worth checking first? The pump (located in the loft) appears to be fed from the cold water storage tank (sited directly next to the pump) and a standard hot-water cylinder downstairs.

I'm struggling to rationalise in my mind:

1. Why there was suddently no hot water?
2. Why the pump continues to run - where is it pumping water if the shower is off?

All the best,

Mark

 

[parkview094]

Our shower pump woes have gotten worse! There's absolutely no hot through the shower at all now.

Few things I've investigated / discovered:

1. If the shower is powere off, there's plenty of hot water at the shower.
2. Our HW system has a combined feed/vent pipe to the hot water cylinder, so the pump can't be sucking in air from the vent.

Do shower pumps generally have 1 flow switch or 2? Similarly, are the impellers on the hot and cold side independent? I'm wondering if there's some failure in the pump solely on the hot side which is resulting in pumped cold and gravity hot at the shower mixer which is then over-whelmed hence only providing cold?

Someone has conveniently fitted ball-o-fix valves to the feeds before the pump. Can I just try turning off the cold feed and trying the shower? (Or would that cause the cold side to run dry and potentially cease?)

Many thanks in advance,

Mark

 

[kvsalamander]

hi which pump have you got? make and model