North Leeds Plumbing & Heating – Home Improvement and DIY Advice

Adding a shower pump to a shower that is fed by a gravity feed hot water tank will greatly improve its performance. If you want to fit a mixer shower that works from an ordinary gravity fed system it is essential to consider the rate of flow that you can get from your shower head. In other words you need to know how much water can get through it. You will need 0.5 bar of water pressure to make it work properly and even then if someone turns on the water in another part of the house the water can go scalding hot, or freezing cold because the balance will be lost.

If you turn on your bath taps as far as they will go you will be able to see if the rate of flow is equal between hot and cold water. If one is coming through at a higher pressure the shower will not work as well as it should.

The way to resolve this problem is to fit a shower pump that pushes the water to your shower head at a greater pressure and gives a much better shower. This sounds like a good solution but you will need to have a large hot water storage tank to use a shower pump because it will use up to 25 litres of hot water per minute and a normal sized tank will empty very fast. 

To judge how much hot water you can store in your hot water tank monitor it for a few days and see how full you can get the bath before the hot water runs out. You may need to replace your hot water tank with a larger one before you can fit a shower pump.