Recommend me a good, powerful electric shower.....

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......for a busy family of five. The three teens/tweens are showering more in the mornings, and our hot water supply is really not up to the job. Currently we have a pumped mixer and a gravity-fed standard mixer, and the last person in inevitably gets a lukewarm/cold shower.

So we want to replace the standard mixer in the DC's bathroom with an electric shower. Ideally, a good powerful one (I know, it is limited by the wattage, and it can only be so powerful if it has to heat the water too).

Any recommendations? Any watch-outs?

What colour is your hot water cylinder? How old is the boiler?

We were told to get a Mira, 10.8kw I think. Haven't fitted it yet though, so can't tell you whether it's any good!

The hot water cylinder is copper with a big red duvet jacket (yes, that old).

The boiler is exactly five years old.

I think the main problem with the hot water supply is the fact that our pumped shower (Aqualisa Quartz) has a fantastically powerful flow, and can empty the cylinder after two showers.

aha

a plain copper cylinder is quite old. A modern blue one can go from cold to fully hot (more than 100 litres) in 20 minutes, assuming you have a modern boiler. It has a larger and more efficient internal coil. In many cases this means it is heating up the water during your shower, and while you towel off and brush your teeth, and can still deliver hot water two or three times as fast as an electric shower. If you have a good incoming flow from the water main, you could change to a pressurised cylinder such as a Megaflo (it needs no cold water tank, so you need a lot of incoming supply).

Congratulations on the Aqualisa.

Instead of a frail weedy electric shower, I'd go for lower output showers for everyone, so it is not drained so quickly. Aqualisa may offer a lower-output head, but ask them if you can safely reduce its flow.

I think we probably have you to thank for the Aqualisa, PJ. Tis very good!

Hmm....cylinders.....We were actually toying with the idea of updating the cylinder a few months back. We have solar panels and want to install an immersion heater to utilise some of the free electricity on sunny days (and in case of boiler problems), but the plumber said it would be better to replace the cylinder while we were at it. The idea eventually went on the back-burner due to other more pressing demands on our cash, but I had no idea a more modern cylinder could actually improve the hot water supply. I thought it was just a storage device. Heaven knows where I thought the water was heated.

So if we upgraded the cylinder, and reduced the flow on our Aqualisa, we could install a second pumped mixer rather than a weedy electric shower, you say.....?

you could do.

If you are expecting to use electricity sometimes, you should get a cylinder that has an immersion heater, or two (one at top, one at bottom) as well as an indirect coil to heat it from the boiler. I like an unusually large cylinder, which holds more hot water. What size is your old one?

If you have sufficient flow of cold water from the incoming main, you could go for a pressurised cylinder such as a Megaflo. You probably haven't, though, and would need to run a new, larger water pipe all the way to the pavement to get the best from it. Fill a bucket at the cold tap, time it, calculate how many litres per minute it delivers.

here are some examples. You need an indirect cylinder (blue) or possibly a pressurised indirect one (white). A large one can be very heavy so is preferably put on spreaders adjacent to a loadbearing wall (or on a concrete floor)

PigletJohn, the current copper cylinder is about 120cm high and about 45cm diameter (tricky to measure).

While rummaging around, I found something scribbled on the top of it, in pen. It said "Due out 14/1/80".

14th Jan - how's that for a coincidence? That also makes it 34 years old.

Unfortunately, we had a quote for our wind-destroyed fence today, which is into four figures, so the shower once more drops down our To Do list. But the whole cylinder thing has given me definite food for thought, if I want to avoid a weedy shower.

We've just upgraded to a pressurised cylinder. Wow it was worth it, we now have 2 fab powerful showers (that are now hard to extract DH out of). Without even touching the showers themselves.
We upgraded our water connection to allow us to get one as we didn't have fab mains pressure and had a lead main. It was a bit of a faff but definitely worth it.
Upgrading the water main wasn't that expensive or time consuming (2days) even though they had to replace over 30m of pipe down our drive.
We have yet to run out of hot water despite having 13 people staying here over Christmas.
Only thing to be aware of is that one shower tray has developed a leak as the powerful shower is now too much for the crappy sealant - not a problem for us as we are now refitting the bathrooms as part of our refurbishment.