Any plumbers or heating engineers in the house? My shower has a mixer bar, a choice of shower head or hand held thingy, and an electric pump in the attic to get pressure, hot water is gravity fed to it, cold from the mains, if the pump isn't running there is no flow. When you turn the shower on, it senses the pressure drop and fires up. Until it doesn't. It has had moods before, usually solved by opening the tap to the 'hand set' and putting that low in the bath, then turning the shower on and off. This time it has waited until everyone is fecking off for Christmas, and thrown a wobbler where it won't start at all. The pump isn't dead, I've cajoled it into starting a couple of times, but the next time when you really need it to work, it doesn't. I do have cold water pressure, however its possible that its lower than usual, I know that's the case in some areas after last week's freeze. What do you think, air lock? I could get in the attic with a spanner and bowl to release any trapped air, loosen the connections to the mixer bar, just keep trying, or abandon ourselves to having a bath instead over Christmas. When I was a sprog I'm sure we only had bath night on a Sunday and that was it, how do I need a daily shower now? Replacing the system with something else isn't an option in the short term, I just need to start my shower again.
When I used to drain the showers down for the winter at a caravan park Sometimes an air lock would happen when I ran it all back up I removed the shower head put a long piece of hose on and that would draw the water through.
Ok so two things to try. Firstly it could be an air lock if it’s been installed in a bit of a cack handed manor. Definitely worth cracking open a couple of nuts. secondly the inlet of the shower pump normally has a gauze filter in it. An in-line disc/tea strainer type thingy that’s inside the flexi hose connection on the inlet side. Turn the supply to the pump off. There are normally 1/4 turn screwdriver valves on the hoses or gate valves nearby. Remove and clean the filters. They can stop the flow activating the pump. thirdly you shouldn’t have mains water and gravity to a mixer shower. It should be one or the other. Both gravity or both mains but not a mix of the two.
I’ll have a look in the attic, I was assuming that the cold water is under mains pressure but there is a cold tank up there, I’ll have to see where the pipes lead back to. Thanks for the suggestions, I’ll see what I find. I do have the 1/4 turn valves, as long as they are upstream of the filters I’ll have a go at cleaning them. Here up North we do have soft water, not that scaly Southern rubbish that furs your kettle up.
Hmmm ok maybe it’s more to do with an airlock then. Another trick is take the shower head off and then see if it fires up. It’s almost certainly a flow issue then.
Or... give the flow switches a good flicking. Sometimes the little magnet gets jammed (as it does on our Grundfos). And clean your little filters out as per @rustbucket .
Bloody Hall and his new fangled effect. Going around creating magnetic fields in the week before Christmas. Shouldn’t be allowed.
Gives you the opportunity to adjust your prices and practice your inside out backwards whistle that tradesmen do
Send 'em back where they came from, that's what I say. I 'ad that Meghan Markle in the back of the cab once. Lovely girl. You know she's related to African royalty, and helped Albert Einstein out with General Relativity. I didn't know that. PS I think they're actually just simple reed switches.
Actually thinking about it you are right. I doubt a shower pump has the required circuitry to use a hall sensor and there doesn’t seem much point in introducing all that extra expense when a reed switch will do it.
You are correct, sir, I believe. Our Grundfos and our old Stuart Turner just had reed switches. Keep it simple!
Which begs the question I wonder if you could trick the shower pump into action using a decent magnet?
You could also just hotwire the pressure switch in the pump and put a switched power wire down to a convenient temporary switch below the loft hatch then burn out the pump instead when you forget to turn it off. .
It has decided to work normally again today, so I do wonder if it could be water pressure related. That said, I haven’t had a shower yet but the Mrs has, it might be waiting for me before it has another strop.
