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Three Types of Power Shower Systems

By Scott Rodgers

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Published: 19Feb2009
Word count: 632
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If there is one extremely valuable thing that you can't buy with any amount of money, that is time. While you may come up with many potential places where you can save your time, your bathroom shower probably won't be anywhere on top of that list. Nevertheless, if you think for a moment about it, it can make or break the day for you on several occasions like when you need to take a quick 2-minute shower before joining an important meeting. So spending some time or money to solve this problem can come in handy at times. The best option for this purpose would be to install a power shower, or to get it installed from an expert plumber if you are afraid of handling the job yourself.

Typical power showers come with a mixing valve that blends cold and hot water from the gravity fed lines and a built-in pump pushes up water so that you will get good water pressure at the shower head. So first thing to note is that power showers require both a hot water and a cold water supply line so that you can enjoy your bath in all weathers. Ideally, you should connect the lines using gate valves so that you won't need to open up the whole system in case of a shower maintenance job. You can get both a manual power shower and a thermostat one; those with a thermostat would keep the temperature constant even if the supply feeds water to another line in your house. Once you have installed the shower correctly, the pump will start automatically whenever you open the shower.

Now there are three types of power shower systems currently available in the market. The first one is the typical power shower we discussed earlier, the one that has a built-in pump and mixer in a single unit. The mixing valve combines cold and hot water to bring water to the required temperature, while the pump pushes this water towards the shower.

The second type of power shower comes with a single impeller pump, which is positioned between the shower head and the mixer. You won't find many of these nowadays primarily because of their lack of adaptability and also because a better option comes at only a slightly higher price. Anyway, in these systems, cold and hot water lines feed the mixer, from where water moves upwards towards the shower head. The single impeller pump then pushes water to the shower head, but this pump has to be installed close to the head for optimum performance. And since the pump has to be situated between the mixer and the shower head, the ideal place for it is the loft. But in extremely cold weathers, it can result in frozen water inside the lofts, and since the pump needs free air flow, the loft cannot be insulated.

The double impeller pump, which is the most adaptable power shower system, was designed to avoid this problem. The cold and hot water lines separately come into the pump, from where water is pushed with pressure towards the mixer separately in both lines. The mixer combines hot and cold water to get the required temperature and a single line then goes to the shower head. Since hot and cold water is pushed upwards, the resulting pressure at the shower brings a fast water flow.

Whichever system you choose, it will need some electricity to run the pumps. In addition, it cannot be used with combination boilers and necessitate the availability of hot and cold water lines. One problem, though, is that they would cause strong vibration inside the walls. So make sure that you have fitted the surrounding tiles smoothly in order to avoid damage to them.

Scott Rodgers is a master plumber who has recently begun writing articles for both a plumbing and non-plumbing audience. To view more of plumbing articles, visit http://eLocalPlumbers.com

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