Whether to pump just shower or whole house

[Simon987]

I am going to fit a Surrey Flange in order to install a shower pump. When I looked at the existing system it looked just as simple to connect the whole system to the Surrey Flange and pump thus allowing higher pressure water to the whole house.

Has anyone done this and are there any pitfalls? I assume I'd need a bit more powerful pump (3 bar?) which would pump whether hot or cold were turned on individually or together. The idea looks simple but in my experience anything in the DIY field which looks simple usually turns into an unmitigated disaster. Any thoughts appreciated. Thanks.

 

[electronicsuk]

I think you may be looking at this from the wrong angle - it probably wont be particularly difficult to pump the 'whole house'*, but are you sure that you want to? These pumps are particularly noisy, and I'm sure will soon become very irritating to hear every time someone runs a tap.

*You wont be able to provide higher pressure water to the whole house, only items that are fed from the cold water storage tank/HW cylinder, i.e. bath taps, showers, etc. You wouldn't want things like toilets to be pumped in any case.

Although I assume you already know this, I'll say it just in case - you shouldn't install one of these pumps on a mains pressure supply (so they are also ruled out if your HW is supplied by a combi boiler).

 

[Richard C]

I agree with electronicsuk; you will always hear most of the larger capacity pumps when they kick in & some makes are unbelievably noisy. In reality, you will gain very little if anything from pumping the whole house on a conventional gravity system & unless it’s correctly done, it could turn into a PITA. Keep it simple; restrict the pumped circuits to you showers & bath & make sure these are separately fed from suitably sized storage tanks, preferably using 22mm pipework.

 

[Simon987]

Thanks for that, I think you're right about keeping it simple so that's what I'll do.