Hot Water - electric boiler/water heater

Nurselayer

Hi folks,

At the moment in our flat we have a water tank and an immersion heater, both the tank and the heater are in a small room in the flat. There is no gas supply in the flat at all. All our radiators are electric and we are happy with the radiators we have.

We want to remove the water tank and immersion heater and find some sort of method which will heat the water that we need for baths, showers, washing up etc. We want something that will take up a lot less room.

There's one bath, one shower, two sinks.

What sort of device should we go for? All advice gratefully received.

Ps. It'd need to be able to fill a decent bath as our current immersion heater can't warm enough water for the bath which is one of the reasons why we want to change.

Ectophile

You can get electric showers. You can get small under-counter water heaters that hold enough water to fill a sink.


But I can't see anything other than a hot water tank that has any hope of filling a bath within a sensible time. If you think how much hot water comes out of an electric shower. That's about the limit to how fast you can sensibly heat water using an instant electric heater.


If you can't fill the bath at the moment, then you need a bigger tank.

getmore4less

As above.

How big is the tank?

Is there more than one heater, electric only tend to have o e at the bottom on cheap electricity and one at the top as a booster.

jk0

The reason for a tank is to store cheap overnight electricity. Getting rid will cost you dear, and probably make the flat unsellable due to an EPC too low to let out.

G_M

Are you on cheap night-time electricity? That would be normal with a using an emmersion heater.
But similarly I' expect your room heaters to be storage heaters or at least some of them. Are they?


If you are using standard rate electricity for both room and water heating, that will be expensive.

our current immersion heater can't warm enough water for the bath

How big is the tank?It may not be the size of the tank that's the problem, but that either
* the thermostat is set too low so the water is not hot enough and/or
* the lenth of the heating element is too short so only heats half the water in the tank


https://www.amazon.co.uk/immersion-heater-thermostat/s?k=immersion+heater+thermostat


https://www.diydata.com/problem/immersion/immersion_heaters.php

Fire_Fox

Nurselayer wrote: »

Hi folks,

At the moment in our flat we have a water tank and an immersion heater, both the tank and the heater are in a small room in the flat. There is no gas supply in the flat at all. All our radiators are electric and we are happy with the radiators we have.

We want to remove the water tank and immersion heater and find some sort of method which will heat the water that we need for baths, showers, washing up etc. We want something that will take up a lot less room.

There's one bath, one shower, two sinks.

What sort of device should we go for? All advice gratefully received.

Ps. It'd need to be able to fill a decent bath as our current immersion heater can't warm enough water for the bath which is one of the reasons why we want to change.

Snap. I loathe and detest my bulky immersion heater and the associated 'spaghetti junction' of pipework. :mad:

Depends what you mean by "small room", why your immersion heater cannot supply sufficient hot water, the size of the building/ block, the mains water pressure (can vary with the floor/ elevation) ....

The general concensus seems to be that an electric combi boiler ('on demand') cannot supply hot water fast enough for a decent shower, perhaps not even a speedy sinkful for washing the dishes, depending on your mains water pressure. You may end up needing two or even three solutions (eg. boiling water tap).

Your small room may be a 'fire compartment' [see Building Regs on the Planning Portal]. If so AFAIK any replacement system will also need to be in a fire compartment, so a kitchen (say) if moving from its current location. Bathrooms often are not fire compartments so may need to be altered structurally.

Is your immersion heater the recommended size? If yes has it been serviced recently, are the element(s) and thermostat(s) in full working order? Are they working in sync with your electricity meter(s) and timer clock?

Are you never able to get a bathful, even if your immersion heater is switched 'on' (constant not timed)? Or not after using some of your preheated hot water for other purposes (thus diluting/ cooling the stored hot water)?

Nurselayer

Thanks for the replies so far.

Heaters are not storage heaters, they are these (or very similar) - https://www.tradingdepot.co.uk/glass-fronted-electronic-panel-heater-0-75kw-white?refSrc=2962&nosto=nosto-page-product1

Unfortunately keeping the tank and immersion heater is not an option, we have redone the whole place with the sole aim of saving the space they take up to turn the room into a study. We were advised that an electric boiler/heater would be the answer, which is why we made the plans that we have. We just ran out of money to replace the tank/immersion before we could finish everything. We're now in a position to look at putting in a boiler/heater. If it was an absolute necessity I guess we could put a water radiator in the study but we wouldn't really want to run them through the whole place.

Our shower is not an electric shower, we took one of those out so we could have our beautiful mixer shower. We wouldn't put an electric shower back in.

Our previous place had a gas boiler and we just ran a bath and it was hot - I don't understand why this would be different with an electric heater/boiler?

Anyway, if any of you do have some ideas about how we can get rid of the tank and still have a bath - that'd be wonderful. Or is it just impossible?

molerat

A gas combi will likely be around 30kW, an electric shower around 9kW - see the difference in power output. If using electric as your water heating source stored hot water is the only viable option, you simply cannot get enough electric power to get instantaneous bath water.

Nurselayer

Thanks Molerat.

Could we find a slimline cylinder that might do the job? My gf has been googling and suggested a non-vented water cylinder.

By my estimate our bath holds 294 litres. So I guess we'd need a 150 litre cylinder to have enough hot water for a bath?

Does that mean we'd have to constantly heat 150 litres of water? That'd seem like a horrific waste of energy/money.