Showers - water pressure

Diggs.

So the hubbie and I have just moved into our first home (yay!). Unfortunately the water pressure is dire (boo!). Both showers are apparently operating at 3 litres p/min.

I wondered if anyone could help with what options are available and what's recommended to power up our showers (or at least one of them) a bit?

We currently have an electric shower upstairs and a mixer downstairs. We'd prefer for the downstairs shower to be fixed up. I looked into power showers which have the pump installed in the actual shower unit and think this is likely to be the cheapest option. However, I think that we would need to put in an electricity source thingy to power the pump. We obv already have elec to the upstairs shower but think we would need to do some plumbing work to get the hot water tank to feed the shower if we installed the power shower upstairs. I imagine it would be cheaper to get elec to the d/s shower than hot water to the u/s - does that sound right?

The other options as far as I can tell are to either instal pumps for both water tanks or get a new boiler and pressurise the system. Both I think would be a lot more pricey.

Any advice/tips/glaring mistakes in my assessment to date? Are there any other options I've missed?

If we went with the integrated pump unit, does anyone know what we should expect to spend? So far it's lookong like we could get a decent unit for 200-250 but not sure what costs we're likely to incur for installation (including the elec work).

Any help greatly appreciated! Thanks

macman

With an electric shower, all you can do is increase the power rating (assuming that the cold feed has sufficient flow and pressure in the first place). This may require you to uprate the dedicated circuit supplying the shower to a higher rating.
Shower pumps are normally installed in the airing cupboard near the hot water tank.

jimmy_81

I might be mistaken - I'm certainly no expert! - but I believe you'd need a dedicated connection to the hot water tank if you want a pumped shower. So you might be looking at some new plumbing regardless...

Definitely worth checking the pressure & flow rate of the mains supply - as macman says, if the mains is weak then an electric shower will always be disappointing.

Probably also worth looking at in broader context; how old is the boiler, how's the central heating doing, etc etc... Pointless to spend money improving the shower now if you're going to replace the entire system next year!

-taff

You could get instantaneous hot water heaters attached to the cold to shower with, but it'll be pricey to get 2...

forgot to say that they're not supposed to be much good for hard water areas...mine's still working fine though....

mumps

I don't know if it would help but we got a shower head from ecocamel, they do shower heads that are economical with water but one is for low water pressure and it worked for me.

Diggs.

Thanks for the replies. The shower we'd like to upgrade (d/s) isn't an electric one. It has separate dedicated hot and cold water supplies which are then mixed in the unit or something. It just doesn't have the electric connection required to operate the pump (though its adjacent to the utility room so think this shouldn't be a huge job to wire it up?)

The boiler is pretty new so wont need replacing any time soon. Though it's a back boiler and we'd quite like to get rid of the fireplace it's placed behind so had thought about getting a new boiler in the loft in the long term. I have no idea what cost/work would be involved in that though or what options we have as it's not something we had placed as an immediate priority...?

southcoastrgi

if you have a gas fire front in front of your back boiler it isn't a "new boiler"