8599 electric showers

When I suggested we get an electric shower my husband said that they take too much electricity - I suppose when you consider that our supply cannot cope with an electric kettle that makes sense.

Must depend on what supply you have.

Flyingpigs is correct, most Italians have a 3.3 KW supply, an electric shower needs between 9 KW and 10.5 KW.

thanks flying pigs!
guess thats it then!
its just that the house is huge and it seems crazy to fire up the old boiler (thats if i can even get it goin)to get a shower.
wet wipes as a last resort!
simon

Wall-mounted electric immersion heaters (scaldabagni) are probably the typical Italian solution. They're cheap (under €100 for some) and use low power (which does however mean that they take a while to warm up).

Just add one to your system.

Of course it won't give you a power shower, unless you've already got a pressurising pump (autoclave) on your whole system, which is also quite common.

thanks bosco

a geometra ,just told me they were expensive to run! need to research further i think.
so much to learn!

regards
simon

I didn't have my thinking head on when we moved out last year. I brought a 9kw shower that was going for nothing & months later its still in a box somewhere. Useless.
Have seen cheap gas powered instant hot water heaters as cheap as E200. Can't remember the litres/temp per minute but seemed respectable enough at the time. Running off mains water (if your bathroom isn't entirely fed by header tank)they are no more challenging to install than an electric job. Anything has got to be better than the miserable shower we get from the electric heater fed by the header tank one metre above the shower head we have.
Pilch

Forget about electric showers - just too many watts for Italian systems . If you can just get it plumbed in to your hot water boiler system go for it.

Pilchard said

"Anything has got to be better than the miserable shower we get from the electric heater fed by the header tank one metre above the shower head we have."

Put a pressure-activated electric pump (called an autoclave in Italian idraulico-speak) into your system to raise its pressure to around 3 bar. That'd give you a much better shower (and taps). Should be easy as you've obviously got electricity fairly near the outflow from your tank. However this solution does depend on your tank being able to fill up fast enough to cope with the increased flow out of it.

Thanks for that Bosco. Am aware that these things are available but assumed them to be quite expensive. How much do you reckon? Have also toyed with idea of installing a power shower type pump.
Pilch

Hi Pilchard

This is simply the first sensible result I got as a result of a web search. You'd need one pump and one controller. Not very expensive - presumably because of the high demand in Italy.

[url=http://www.bricoshop.it/browse.asp?cat=1007&path=29,1007]BRICO SHOP FAI DA TE :::… Pompe autoclave, elettropompe, pompe sommerse[/url]

I have no connection with or knowledge of this company and cannot guarantee the quality. There are of course fitting charges if you're not doing DIY, and according to the law (as in UK) a new electrical connection should really be made by a qualified electrician..... a law which I am sure that everyone complies with!

There is a slight drawback to these systems that you won't have thought of. The pump kicks in every time you turn a tap on, flush, shower etc. It's not a lot of electricity, but sometimes it's the unexpected straw that breaks the camel's back if your power consumption is already up to the limit of your supply. Otherwise they're good things to have.

[quote=pilchard;81045]............ Anything has got to be better than the miserable shower we get from the electric heater fed by the header tank one metre above the shower head we have.......[/quote]

Have you tried replacing the shower head with a 'low pressure' head? - bigger holes - more water.

.

Hi Bosco,
Re- the pump number: there actually quite cheap aren't they. Thanks for the link. Figure at the consumption rate it wouldn't break the bank, but, as it's only the shower it really needs to serve could plumb it in direct to the wall mounted boiler and either screw pump to wall in the bathroom where it will look ugly and might be noisy or send a couple of pipes into the loft and site the thing up there. After having said all that we are only in this house temporarily and once the weather breaks we will be back on our hill.

Hi Alan,
In fact the shower head that was replaced gave a seriously miserable shower so I changed it for one that had finer holes but lots more of them. It's not good but just about acceptable.
Pilch

hi pilch
hope you are well.
have just read through the posts to my thread.all seems a lot of effort for a shower!
eventually hoping to run a b&b with possibly 3/4 operating at once(if we ever got that many bookings) so we need to operate in stages.
the power must be at the property,as their are industrial ovens there.is it that much more expensive to have say 10kw turned on?
could poss buy your shower then pilch!!!
simon