An electric power shower

[BlackAlys]

Is there such a thing? So powerful electric showers exist or are they an urban myth?!

I remember looking but didn’t see anything on the usual UK websites.
As I understand it, you can only (safely?) pump the water after it s been through the heater, which increases the size of the unit a lot.

No.

An electric shower is a weedy little thing that receives cold water at mains pressure, and instantly heats it so it emerges about tepid, at a small rate. The water is warmer in summer than in winter.

A power shower has a pump that draws ready-heated water from a hot water cylinder and discharges it at high pressure at the user.

Electric showers rely on mains pressure. Our incoming pressure is frankly excessive - we had pressure reducing valves added in the kitchen and utility as otherwise the water sprayed everywhere. Consequently, I find a 10kW shower perfectly powerful enough to give a reasonable shower.

bearing in mind that a typical modern combi has around 30kW of power so can deliver three times as much hot water flow, and a power shower or an unvented cylinder can deliver more, I still comsider electric showers to be weedy.

In most cases no- as I understand it an electric shower has to heat the water as it comes into the house (imagine someone holding a lighter under a pipe of water) whereas other showers either take water from a storage tank just have to pump it out as quickly as possible or the boiler (in a combi system- so the lighter equivalent) is much more powerful. If you have really good mains pressure and the best electric shower you can buy you might get a good flow but it’s unlikely to be powerful.

Ours is fine because our incoming water pressure is excessive. It used to literally raise the kitchen tap backwards if you put it on full. We learned not to do this but visitors and work people we had in were pretty shocked.

We have a 10kw electric shower in the children's bathroom. It is more than decent and we didn't want them burning through the tank water which we use for our shower.

Over the past few decades the supply of hot water has changed from stored to on demand for energy efficiency reasons That has led to the use of electric showers that as John says are heating cold water, and the rate of flow and temperature depends solely on the ambient temperature of the incoming mains.

I personally don't like running hot water even from a combi boiler as this works on the same principle and the older boilers took a lifetime to fill a large bath.

To create a 'power shower' (a misnomer) you have to store heated water and blend it at the same pressure as the incoming mains. Just to say it's a lot more complicated than any other solution and a lot more costly.

The ultimate solution is a pressurised storage tank.

since energy from electricity costs four or five times as much as energy from gas, you could have more hot water and a better shower if you heat it with a gas boiler rather than an electric shower.

We have an Aqualisa electric "power" shower in a loft bathroom that's higher than our cold water tank so has terrible pressure. It works really well. However as @PigletJohn says it's expensive to run and - having just replaced our boiler with a system one so pressure problems no longer an issue - will look to replace it in the medium term, when funds allow.

https://www.aqualisa.co.uk/products/type/power-showers.html

@PigletJohn

since energy from electricity costs four or five times as much as energy from gas, you could have more hot water and a better shower if you heat it with a gas boiler rather than an electric shower.

...and at lower cost.

All-round win, I think.

I should provide more info:

We are renovating and are taking our house from a combi boiler powered by LPG (we aren't able to get piped gas) to a house powered by air source heat pump.

The electrician has said he can feed more power to the attic shower room to have an electric shower that's powered differently to everything else "just in case".

I'm not sure who to listen to!

We did something similar when we lived at a property with LPG gas for central heating and hot water. Very occasionally (about 4 times in 20 years) the gas was not filled on time and we were without heating or hot water. We had an immersion heater and an electric pumped shower. It was a Mira Event XS Thermostatic and used both hot and cold feed and was one of the best showers we ever had.

I have to say the running costs were secondary to the 'just in case' requirement.

I've just seen that the Mira website refers to it as 'gravity fed' so it may not be suitable for an attic shower room. (That's Isaacs Newton's fault. Before he invented gravity, one could do all manner of things that we can't now. )