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Oct 9, 2020
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Hello all

I have a pressure problem in my shower.

I am on the 3rd floor.

I have put a 25m 15mm plastic pipe through the roof space to nearly the other side of the building to my new shower.

The pressure of the water in the toilet I have tapped off the cold water is OK (ish). The building does not have working hot water.

The pipe comes down from the ceiling, the cold splits to the cold input to my mixer shower then the other side goes to a tesy bilight 2kw 100l electric heater. I have installed the safety valve on the boiler as the instructions dictated.

The hot output of the heater then goes to the mixer shower.

The problem is the water pressure is poor and it either dribbles a bit while it gets going then sometimes when it gets going it sort of oscillates higher then lower pressure.

At the time of day its used there is no one else in the building using the water.

I have bought a pump but not installed it yet.

Should I put the pump on the main cold-water feed coming down from the ceiling, on just the cold going to the shower, or on just the hot output from the boiler? Or to the input of the boiler?

Do I need any one-way valves? If so where do I put them?

I could reduce the setpoint of the boiler much lower and just use hot water for the shower if it was better to do so.

My background is in electronics and optics and not plumbing so I'd like a little be of help from someone that knows what they are doing!

Many thanks in advance
 
What's the supply pressure to your building? At say 15 litre/min my back of the envelope calculation, which you'll want to check, says you are going to get a dynamic pressure drop of between 0.5 and 1 bar along your 25m pipe. You'll lose another ca 1 bar due to the three-storey rise.

Broadly speaking, it is better to 'push' water along a pipe with a pump at the supply end than to try to 'suck' it along from the delivery end.

You really need to make some static and dynamic pressure measurements as your starting point. Remove the guesswork.
 

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