New shower help please!

[Grawnye]

We've got a crappy electric over-bath shower which I hate for several reasons, not least because it's like being washed with a watering can. The pressure is low and the bathroom is draughty and so standing up in the bath with a weak shower is a chilly and fairly miserable experience.

What are my options for replacing it, do you think? Constraints: Budget isn't huge. OH says the water pressure to the house is low. We don't appear to have a cold water storage tank (??). We do have a combo boiler.

My ideal would be to have a separate cubicle power shower (we do have the space for it) but I don't know if that's way more expensive than just replacing the over bath.

Has anyone been in similar situation and what was your best solution? How do you get a good shower if the pressure is low?

Thanks for any help

Our water pressure is low so we had a pump fitted which has made a huge difference.

"How do you get a good shower if pressure is low"

You improve the water flow.

Fill a bucket at the kitchen cold tap (and the garden tap, utility room, scullery tap if you have them).

Time it to fill.

Calculate litres per minute

How many is it?

Put your thumb on the kitchen cold tap. Can you stop the flow?

How old is your house?

What colour is the incoming water pipe? Plastic, steel, lead, copper? How thick?

How far is your house from the road?

Thanks for replies!

Was the pump for an electric shower or a "mains" power shower?

piglet

House is probably about 110/130 years old.
End of terrace house. At end of a cul de sac, front steps down to pavement so about 2 metres from road

Kitchen tap is lower ground floor and I can't stop the flow with my thumb. I measured twice. Once was 5.5 seconds per litre, once was 4 seconds.

Bathroom tap is raised ground floor and I can't stop that with my thumb either. That was 3.3 seconds per litre.

Water pipe into the house is copper (I think).

Our pump was fitted to a mains power shower and now to a mains rainfall shower.

Thank you marmite

Just realised I didn't complete the litres per minute!

Kitchen tap must be approx 10 litre per minute

Bathroom tap slightly better.

This is a very rough diagram of our bathroom. I was quite hoping a separate cubicle would somehow be possible between the current bath and the toilet (marked in black on my picture). So the shower would be adjacent to the bath, with the toilet on the other side.

However, I was just doing some research online and it seems that might be against building regs? The guidance was unclear about whether the entire long side of the bath needed to be clear or just a portion. Maybe it wouldn't work and I need to stick to overbath! So cold standing up in an open bath though.

Could you move your loo under the window to make more space for shower?

water flow to the cold tap appears to be about 13 litres per minute. That is good enough for a shower but rather slow for a bath. The bath tap is giving 18 lpm which, if it comes straight off a combi or the mains with no tank, is fine, and you would get good results from an unvented cylinder such as a Megaflow.

Copper pipe is usually 15mm/half inch which is a thick as your finger.

There will be a pressure gauge on your boiler, is it around 1.5bar?

if the house is around 110 years old, the original water pipe was most likely lead and rather narrow, because it was expected just to fill a loft tank. If the part you can see is copper, it might be a newer addition close by the stopcock, or possibly a trench was dug and a new pipe laid, in which case you should see signs of digging, especially in concrete floors, drive and paving. It could have been done any time in the past 50 years, though. in the event that you still have a lead pipe going out to the pavement (look at any stopcock or meter in the pavement) then it could start leaking at any time and need to be replaced. If replaced, you would use a larger, plastic pipe that will give much better flow.

I suspect that the internal pipework in your house may be slowing the flow down. look for any service valves on the pipes or under taps, especially if they look like this
Although they seemed a great invention at first, the hole is the ball is smaller than the pipe so they constrict flow, and the cheaper ones (as in the link) like to leak for no reason. You can get a better one without these drawbacks. As they are so cheap and convenient they are often used in profusion, and this reduces water flow. Flexible tap connectors, in braided woven stainless, are also narrow and constrict flow. Sometimes they burst.