Electric showers - are they awful?

[Twoshoesnewshoes]

I’m trying to find ways to use less heating oil, to cut carbon emissions.
thinking of getting an electric shower in one of our two bathrooms so we can use this in the summer and mostly turn the boiler off.
but my experience of electric showers has been of standing under some pleasantly warm rain.
does anyone have a powerful electric shower?

We have electric and the rainfall non electric type one and tried to go months without the electric and life was awful! Six of us all waiting for a shower where the (solar panel and boost function powered) shower would go cold quickly! I live for electric showers!!!!!

@stayathomer is your electric shower powerful? What make is it please?

Most electric showers I've ever been under, I could dribble faster. A decent shower is a daily pleasure and a rubbish one would do my head in.

My electric shower is pretty decent. You can get different shower heads to allow you to adjust the rate the water comes out. So I can have rainfall or a trickle. Mine is a Mira shower.

I had a connected shower in my old place and running out of hot water from the tank was a pain.

I don't think I've ever used an electric shower that's powerful. If it was it would probably use a tonne of electricity!

Love mine. Not a power shower but pressure-wise actually better than my previous mixer shower.

It's quite elderly now and when I looked at replacing it (during a bathroom refit) I couldn't really find an equivalent.

Buy a mira shower, the highest power available. Don't skimp.

It won't be quite as good as a top power shower but will give a decent shower, especially in summer. The flow rate will decrease a bit in cold weather.

Thank you everyone, I’ll have a look at Mira.
ummmm I don’t know if gravity fed - it’s a pressurised system

Electric showers come in different KW power levels. The higher the KW the more powerful the throughput of hot water. Your wiring does need to have the capability of supporting a higher kw shower though. You need to speak to an electrician.
We have 1 Electric shower of around 9kw, I think. It was used by DS when he lived here and although not as powerful as our mains power shower, it was fine. He's now moved into a house with what is probably the lowest power Electric shower, and he's certainly noticed the difference.
A word of warning though. Electric showers are expensive to run and if you have teenagers or anyone with long hair who spends over 10 minutes in the shower, it will be expensive.
We heat our water with oil and leave our hot water on over the summer months whilst the heating is off. The water heats up for 2 1/2 hours a day (split between morning and evening). The tank is well lagged and this is sufficient to give us multiple showers a day if needed. We use very little oil over the summer. Our electricity bill has reduced massively since DS left home and the Electric shower is barely used. We deliberately chose to keep 1 Electric shower so that when the boiler breaks down (it has twice), we still have a means to shower using the electric one.

Same as @ohtowinthelottery . We have oil central heating, an immersion heater, a stove back boiler and both kinds of showers.
When we had two teenage boys at home the shower use was extensive. Electric showers are probably the most expensive way to do it.
Most cost effective over 30 years was to use the oil to heat the water in summer.
Now we have solar so generally heat our water with electricity throughout the summer but revert to oil in winter.
We have a Mira shower in one room which is only used very occasionally. In the bathroom there's a tank fed shower and an electric one. The electric one is only used if there's no hot water.

If you have a hot water tank you most probably have an immersion heater that you could use to heat up the water in the event of boiler failure.

Most people do not even know they have one until it is switched on accidentally.

Electric showers are expensive and don't really have the power to deliver a high pressure hot shower.

I would say unvented cylinders probably give the best shower. Just a ton of hot water obtained cheaply through gas and at high pressure.

We have Mira electric showers, 2 in 18 years, super powerful and wouldn't have anything else.

I can't speak to the quality of electric showers as they've been crap at every rental I've lived in. What I can tell you to avoid is this: the electric shower running cold any time the w/m, d/w, toilet or any tap in the house is used.

I have no idea why that happened in one particular rental, but I can say it's particularly unpleasant having to avoid flushing a toilet or using a tap when your hands are covered in period blood because the other half will have to stand under a cold shower for between 1.5 and 2 minutes.

Not to mention, sometimes bowel movements don't always choose their timing.

DEFINITELY avoid that.

We’ve just had a new triton electric shower in one bathroom and a regular shower fitted in the other, and there is very little difference between them.

@GasPanic We do have an immersion heater, although bizarrely it only heats the top of the tank. Some throwback from when we converted to oil heating from our old Economy 7 system, I think.
We don't really use hot water except for showering and a small amount of dishes that we hand-wash. Our dishwasher and washing machine are both cold fill.

Twoshoesnewshoes

It’s a Mira

I’ve had electric showers and they’ve been fine. Get a decent brand

Electric showers tend to have max power of about 10kw so may not be as good as a boiler fed shower which can run at 30kW.

Then again boiler fed showers aren't as good if you multiple showers running at the same time. They can be perfectly fine if combi boilers etc aren't available.

The children have an electric shower in their bathroom, I believe it is either Mira or Aqualisa. I think it is a 10kw and it is really decent. Better in summer when the incoming water is warmer. All our cold water taps and therefore shower feed is mains pressure and we have incredible incoming water pressure like lift the kitchen tap push back pressure.

However, it is nothing compared to the Mira pumped (because we are gravity fed) shower we have in our bathroom. We don't even have that at the full flow setting either. However, we wanted one electric shower for medical reasons, potentially needing a hot shower maybe in the middle of the night.

Lots of shitty electric showers are on a 6kw electric power feed so we made sure that we had a cable installed that could cope with a 10kw shower, there wasn't a shower in the bathroom before. Check that before you upgrade any electric shower.

But a 10kw shower will burn through a lot of power so if you have teens who live under the shower this is problematic. A shower speaker helps them realise how many songs they have been in there for and that I can cut it from the outside of the bathroom as the pull switch is in the tank cupboard.

This is all so helpful, thank you!
our children have left home now, so it will mostly just be ma and DH.
if it’s comparable in cost then I’d rather run the electric shower to reduce carbon emissions, I will try to find a calculator for that!

I feel totally stupid, but what sort of shower is there other than an electric one??

Our one breaks every 3yrs thanks to the hard water. My teen uses it. It's rubbish but it's so handy on the rare occasion the boiler plays up.

One that’s run off a pump, but that works off electricity with water is through the hot water system, whereas electric showers heat up water as they are used. Aqualisa are pumped with hot water, Mira and Triton are electric only showers. This is my limited knowledge of being married to a plumber.