Electric showers

[househunt89]

Hi all

Looking to put an offer on a house this week.

The upstairs bathrooms have electric showers 😅

I know nothing about them! Is it very costly to remove them completely and replace with normal ones?

Tia

Aren't all showers electric? How do they work otherwise?
🤔

Oh gosh am I being stupid?
What I mean it's the existing shower has one of those old fashioned boxes attached on the wall

I wouldn’t let that put me off buying a house but I would ask questions about boiler capability/ test water pressure in the taps.

Don't know about the cost to replace, you would need to ensure you had a hot water feed to the shower. We thought about replacing the electric shower in our main bathroom but decided against it. (We have a hot water feed shower in the en suite). We have one of each which means we still have a functioning shower if there is a problem with the boiler. This was very useful when we had the boiler moved. What we have done is to replace the old electric shower with one which mixes air with the water and gives the impression of being more powerful than it is.

They work like taps do.

No, all showers are not electric. A shower with mains pressure hot feed (from a Combi boiler) needs no electricity to work.

We have a power shower in the family bathroom and an electric shower in our en suite. When we redid our en suite we thought about replacing it with another power shower but decided against it. Our dc when teenagers coukd easily use the entire HW supply in 2 showers. Having an electric shower means we can always have a shower, even if there's no hot water

It will mean there is no hot water pipe work to the shower - you will have to install new hot water feed from bath - back off times etc. it's a pig of a job

If you have a combi boiler and don't have a hot water cylinder you don't run out of hot water

I think it's sensible to have one in a house; it means you can still wash even if the boiler fails.

They work like taps do

Ours is electric. It runs something (pump?) to give pressure to the water coming out of the shower head. I thought they all have this The water is heated by gas.

We have 3 showers. One is a mains hot and cold feed thermostatic power (no ugly box but it has a pump in the airing cupboard), one is an electric power shower (has a box but runs off the hot & cold water tanks) and the other is an ordinary electric shower (box on wall but heats its own water). Our hot water tank wouldn't have the capacity to operate 3 mains showers and neither would a combi boiler. The electric shower is great when the boiler breaks down - but none of them operate when the electric goes off.

We have one of each which means we still have a functioning shower if there is a problem with the boiler
This is exactly why I like that we have one in one of the bathrooms. You can get much nicer looking ones these days too, like the Mira glass ones. The other bathroom we changed to an Aqualisa dual head digital shower using the existing wiring but it looks much more fancy obvs.

Why are you automatically assuming you would replace it? I love my electric shower 😊

(My electric shower replaced a mixer shower so I assume all previous plumbing in place, although the shower is about 5ft away from where the mixer was )

I wouldn't have an issue with an electric shower, as long as it worked. Have you checked the pressure? The electric shower where I'm living is awful as it's practically the same height as the water tank it's fed by. Only one of the pressure settings works and that's comes out as a dribble. I've lived in plenty of other places where they've been fine though. No combi boiler here, so not sure how easy it would be to retrofit and get the pressure better.

This is the first house with an electric shower and I would change back.
I prefare upstairs as the pressure is better but can still have a lovely shower downstairs though but more gentle.

Your boiler won't work without electricity though...

Anyway, I'd not be looking at changing. I have one of each. In my experience the difference in running cost is minimal. Both work fine, though my electric shower is quite old, and I'll be looking to replace it with another electric one. It's good to have an electric shower as others have said, as you still have hot water for washing if your boiler goes down.

We don't have a boiler, not sure if that makes a difference?

I love my electric shower, it's fantastic.

Never realised electric showers were considered 'old fashioned'.

No idea of the cost to change, but it's something I keep meaning to look at because electric showers are very expensive to run and if you conservatively estimate a 10.8 (typical) kW shower for a 10 minute shower a day each for a family of 4, that's about £2 a day at the current price cap rate, or £60 a month of electricity just on showering.

Ours is OK, but not great and every time I stay in a hotel with tap style showers I always think 'all this water is lovely, I wish our home shower was this good'.

We haven't done it up to now because what happens (twice) is that the shower breaks and we need a new one now and DP just goes and buys the same one and refits it in a couple of hours, but obviously changing to a tap shower would be a major plumbing exercise.

Ah thanks everyone for your input

(Very stupid of me ) but I didn't realise people still have electric showers these days 😂 always imagined it was quite an old fashioned thing to have.

After your replies we'll be looking at keeping it then. Maybe her w more modern one.

No we didn't check the pressure 🙈 but have another viewing booked at some point so will definitely do it then.

Thanks all again

This is so bizarre! I've never lived in a house that doesn't have an electric shower, have never heard of them being old fashioned - surely they are a lot more modern that ones run off the main boiler? Trying to resist the urge to Google and fall down a rabbit hole but surely the idea of heating water to wash with via a boiler system (i.e. roman baths etc) is about 2000 years older than the invention of the electric shower?

Do you live in England OP? Electric showers are pretty standard and new, I'd consider the other type as old fashioned now!

We have an electric shower, it's OK for a shower but at 12kW it's really expensive to run. If you have someone teenager who likes a 30 minute shower that's £1.60 ish in today's money.
A good mixer shower from a pressurised hot water system (combi/solar/gas/heatpump) will knock spots off it though.

It's not a very easy swap as the electric shower only has a cold water input and a mixer shower needs two pipes running to it.

10.5kW I mean. Still a lot. Equivalent of 3-4 kettles boiling for the whole duration of the shower.