Shower woes

[ricko'shea]

Wonder if anyone has encountered the following situation before ?
To attempt to cut a long story short...property is a maisonette on ground floor & first floor. The airing cupboard on the first floor contains a Gledhill ShowerCyl cylinder of around 1994 vintage. Cold water is provided by mains pressure, there is no cold water tank providing cold water to the property - only the maisonette above is fed by a cold water tank.

Over the last few months the thermostatic mixer shower has got progressively worse - to the point of only being able to provide hot water for 30 seconds or so. As I'm no expert I called in a plumber. His opinion was that the shower itself was limescaled up and the cartridge needed to be replaced - his recommendation was to replace the whole shower assembly as the existing shower was at least 12 years old. Therefore we agreed to have a Mira Excel thermostatic shower unit installed.

This improved matters but only slightly - hot water was delivered for around 2 minutes before going cold.

Rather than install a complete new hot water cylinder ( as it was now believed that the shower coil in the cylinder providing the hot water was likely to be faulty / scaled up ) the cheaper option was to take out the new thermostatic shower and replace with an electric shower - a Triton T80XR was duly installed.

Next issue - no hot water. The low pressure light was lit on the shower unit although the flow rate appears to be okay at 14 litres/min, whereas the min stated by Triton is 9 litres/min.

Assuming the electric shower must be faulty, the plumber replaced it with another new one. This displayed exactly the same symptoms. Next step - get a Triton engineer in.

He tested the mains water pressure at 0.4Bar running, 0.8Bar static. The min as specified by Triton for the electric shower to operate is 1.0Bar running pressure.

Plenty of googling shows no electric shower will operate with mains pressure at these values.

Obviously we cannot add a pump to the system as we are mains fed - does anyone else have an idea of what to try next ( apart from sack the plumber ) !

TIA

 

[breezer]

have you looked a t tlc and screwfix sites, one of them has a shower with pump, but i think thats not allowed, but they do sell one, but no idea of min head required

 

[BoxBasher]

Being on a ground floor the minimum flow you should be supplied with is 9 l/m @ 1bar (that is a dynamic reading set by regulator).

If the local water company is not supplying that to the property boundary then they need to rectify the situation. If they are supplying it then there may be an internal blockage/restriction.

I think it is well worth asking your water company to investigate for a poor supply first, at least they will be able to confirm the true readings (shower engineers occasionally fudge figures when they are lost for a solution, a little like BG do) getting them out shouldn't cost you anything.

 

[bab]

Those pressure's seem to low to me .If the unit was workin ok b4 then i wonder if ya mains supply pressure has dropped. will the flat above let u test there pressure or even a couple a houses away. Ring the local utility company to find what the static pressure in your area is . you may have a burst on the supply. i live i a very rural area with a poor supply & still have 1.5 bar static. It does sound like ya plunber has missed the 1st rules of engagement.

 

[Triton]

Fit a pump from a tank if you have one, Can fit a negative head switch if needed.

 

[ricko'shea]

Installed a Mira Zest Electric Shower unit in place of the Triton one.

Works a treat Mira 1 Triton 0.