cold showers

[telectrix]

recently fitted new instantaneous shower for m-i-l. shower will not heat up due to showing low water pressure indicator. have problems with our own shower exactly the same but not constantly. united utilities have been and checked the pressure in the street and said it's good. but that's at a point 20 feet lower than the shower. i don't believe them as even when i turn on a cold tap, the flow is poor compared to wherever else i've been. how can i tell what the pressure is, and is there a remedy, short of fitting a booster pump which would have to be triggered from the shower?

 

[pushrod]

just checked mine and it is approx 14 litres per min, so 5 L/min does seems a bit piddly!

Wife wondered what on earth i was doing lol

 

[telectrix]

i could do better after 8 pints of good ale. so, if it's the pipe from the street to the house, who's liable to replace it?

 

[Geordie Spark]

it's fed off the rising main. and i think the united utilities guy said the pressure was 3 bar. but, everwhere i've lived even in hard water areas, when you turned the cold tap on, the water bounced off the bottom of the sink. here , it just flows about the same rate as a watering can. ( best analogy i can make )

3 bar is quite a good pressure. I think I would be happy with that.

I think the flow is the problem, Flow & pressure are 2 different things (think Volts & Amps) You can have water at a pressure high enough to be able to cut through steel plate, but it would take forever to fill a bath !!

To give you an idea about flow rates, A decent combi boiler will give you about 11 litres per minute - providing of course that you have at least that amount coming into the property in the first place.

We use a Weir Cup to measure this which is like a measuring jug with a slot running down the side. Like this: Flowmate II flow cup weir gauge plumbers' water flowmeter

 

[pushrod]

i could do better after 8 pints of good ale. so, if it's the pipe from the street to the house, who's liable to replace it?

If the fault is on your property then think it is down to you - i would check with neighbours to see if they have similar flow rate. If it is the whole street then think it is down to them.

 

[pushrod]

If it is just your house join the utilities insurance scheme before you mention it to them!

 

[Geordie Spark]

i could do better after 8 pints of good ale. so, if it's the pipe from the street to the house, who's liable to replace it?

It's your responsibilty from the stopcock out as far as the boundary of the property.

If you want to replace it, you need to dig a trench 700mm deep from the house to the boundary & lay 25mm Alkathene pipe in it on a bed of sand & covered with sand before back filling.

Use a 25mm to 22mm stopcock inside the house. If you want to be really pukka, use 22mm pipe - either copper or plastic for the rising main & branch off from that in 15mm to your taps etc.

The water company will connect from the boundary to their main in the street and some charge & some don't. A bit like the leccy suppliers & isolators !!

 

[tony mc]

Pipes down to you just I had to dig a trench to get the new plasic thing in.

 

[telectrix]

just knocked on 2 neighbours. they both say that the shower goes cold if they turn a tap on or flush the bog. might be that the shower i fitted at m-i-l's has a higher pressure required to activate the pressure switch.

 

[pushrod]

Sounds like whole street then . We had a problem a few months back where the washing maching was stopping mid cycle and showing some funny code - when we looked it up it was flow rate. Turned out there was a leak in a main a couple of streets away that they hadn't got round to fixing. Eventually it burst completely and they had to fix it and then the washer was ok again.

 

[telectrix]

going to check neighbours other side of road see if theirs is the same.

and before anyone says it, yes i do have neighbours that still speak to me, dunno why though. LOL>

 

[telectrix]

update.houses on both sides of the road all say they can't turn a tap on when the shower is in use as it goes cold. that tells me it's a supply problem. we can't all have knackered pipes.

 

[james29022004]

I had a similar problem at a job i was doing once-The chap who came out from thames water told me if they have leaks in a particular area they will turn the pressure down to minimise water loss rather than actually trying to find the leak! I would suggest you and all neighbours affected complain regularly and they might do something about it-you may find you all share a branch of pipe offf the main,if you speak to the man who comes out they are normally very helpfull and on the job i was doing he came and replaced a pipe in the road which sorted out the problem in the 3 flats.

 

[gpz900jim]

on the inlet of a shower is a mesh built into the pipe, take the shower off the wall and look up the inlet to see if the mesh is clean.

 

[telectrix]

what, on all the showers in the dtreet? they all got the same problem.