3 electric showers defective in the same fashion. What gives?

Drake5

Drake5

Drake5

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Bit of a tricky one here. Timelines may not be entirely accurate but...

6 months ago, our Triton shower became defective. Pressure was fine, but no hot water unless turned all the way up (which resulted in barely any pressure). No issues though as the shower was about 3-4 years old at this point so we replaced it with a like for like triton, an Enrich.

The new shower was installed without issue and it worked fine for about 3 months, however it became defective again in the exact same way as the previous one. No hot water unless turned all the way up. I contacted Triton to get it repaired under warranty but it would have taken 2 weeks. I didn't want to be this long without a shower so I purchased another Triton enrich and got it installed.

Installed fine and worked well... For about 4 weeks. Defective again in the exact same fashion. I called Triton again and waited for an engineer to turn up. After about a week he did and said the cabling was wrong (apparently it was to small, 6mm cable which was 'right on the edge' for a 8.5kw shower, so I was advised that was most likely the reason for the defects)

So now I knew I was in for somewhat of a big job. New cabling and another install of a shower (This time a triton Riba)

I got an electrician out and he personally wasn't overly concerned with the wiring going into the shower as he said it still should have been capable, but I got him to replace it anyway. The work he carried out was, entire new cabling from the shower to the fusebox (I think he used 10mm cabling) a new power switch isolation box for the shower as the last one was fitted in an awkward place and finally installing of the new shower. A fairly expensive job, but I thought it needed doing as I was tired with dealing with defective showers.

2 weeks after the install of the triton riba... Same issue again. No hot water coming from the shower unless fully turned up.

I don't know what to do at this point... 3 showers going defective in fairly quick succession has to be an issue in the house somewhere? I know these electric showers are on the lower end, but surely they shouldn't be defective like this.

Can anyone point me in the right direction please? I'm not sure if I need to call an electrician or plumber at this point

Cheers
 
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Terminal_Boy said:
What’s the min and max incoming cold water pressure specs on the failed units?

What’s your cold water mains pressure in the bathroom?
Click to expand...

I don't believe that was ever tested on the first 2 units, they were just taken away.

How can I test my cold water mains pressure? I don't really have a clue about any of this stuff

Cheers
 
Bad batch of units?
Same shop?
electrical spikes...could get the mains tested ,maybe
 
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These low end showers are pretty simple in operation, (The more expensive therostatic ones have a bit more in the ways of electronic controls, so can possibly fail in weirder ways)

Theres two separate elements in the heater can, controlled by the top selector switch, other than that theres no other controls other than an overtemp cut out and prosibily a low-pressure switch in line so it drops out if there is a problem

The bottom temperature control is just a mechanical flow restrictor (Put the shower on cold and turn it up and down and you'll see that its just controling the flow). Basically you've got a tradeoff with flow rate against temperature rise - for any given input power, if you want it hotter, you need to have less water going through, if you want more water, you've got to have it colder.

Now if you are saying you can get the temperature but only by having flow at a very low rate compared to what it was before, then either the water going into it is much cooler to start with (which won't be the case here, but is often something that folk dont understand why shower seems poorer in winter) or there is less power going into the water, which would generally imply one of the heater elements isn't operating. So you'd want to start by checking resistance of the two elements, and then continuity across the microswitches in the top selector dial
 
These showers are simple.

Pressure switch needs to see sufficient pressure to switch the heaters on.
One or Two heating elements are active depending on the power selection. The single dot (low) will barely heat anything.

There 'temperature' knob is just a flow restrictor.

Likely you have too low pressure, when the 'temperature' knob is set to cooler temperatures the flow increases, pressure drops and the heater shuts off.
If you restrict flow, (temperature high) there is sufficient pressure to allow it to engage the heaters but flow is poor..

There is also an intlet filter on these showers which can get clogged and reduce flow which may explain why a new shower works for a short while before the filter clogs. (Page 17 of the link above)

You need a competent plumber.
 
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I appreciate all the advice here guys. Much appreciated.

I'll make contact with a plumber to get them out and give me an opinion. I'll at least be able to confirmation that I don't have any water pressure issues anywhere
 
Do you have hard water with high tds - has triton become scaled up, and newer 'enrichs'? even more susceptible .. so boiler is backing off the power because it might overheat.
plumber told me even for our combi , new builds have a softener of some kind.

otherwise, if you know max flow rate, can calculate how hot 8.5KW could make that water ..
so if you had 14L/min 840l/hr 8.4kw would raise it by 9C, or 420L by 18C ...

jpaul said:
the link to my earlier post had just that ... someones extracted coefficients from the basics of waters heat capacity. 4.186 J/g°C

volume in litres x 4 x temperature rise in degrees centigrade / 3412

(4 being a factor and 3412 being a given constant)

for example 100 litres of water, to be heated from 20ºC to 50ºC, giving a temperature rise of 30ºC would give –

100 x 4 x 30 / 3412 = 3.52 Kwh
Click to expand...
 
Just to provide an update

A plumber came and checked water pressure all across the house, no issues. No other obvious issues with any pipework.

The electrician that installed the last shower for me came and had a look. He replaced the temperature regulator inside the shower but it still did not fix the issue.

Another shower installed and replaced, working fine for the moment.

The only thing that wasn't really changed was the shower head. I was using an adjustable one with different spray patterns so I bought a slightly smaller adjustable shower head. Is it possible for adjustable shower heads to cause issues like this ?
 
It's not one of those silly pressure enhancing heads was it? With gravel inside?
 
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