Plumbing

Periodic low hot water pressure

Anonymous user 28/02/2024 - 3.21 PM

For a few months now we have had a situation where the hot water in the bath (upstairs) would trickle to a halt as would hot water taps downstairs. We had an upstairs extension a few years ago and the hot water pressure in the newly added en-suite was almost non-existent, but we decided to live with that. I explained the current loss of pressure to a local plumber and he said it was likely that the downstairs extension done over 20 years ago and the upstairs one extended the pipes and so required more pressure to deliver the hot water, added to the fact that we had apparently (had) fitted high pressure taps in a low pressure environment and said that the solution is to install a pump in the hot water tank. What he could not explain, however, is why the problem has occurred relatively recently. I did mention that when we were away for a couple of weeks last year the header tank started to overflow. This was spotted by our neighbour (who was looking after the house( & he switched off water at the stopcock. He suggested we had a faulty ball valve in the header tank. With other things going on at the back end of last year this slipped my mind until now. One of my sons went into the loft to look at the header tank and he said it looked like the tank was not filling as quickly as it had been. So I was wondering whether that is the root cause of the problem in that draining the hot water tank is then draining the header tank and so there is a lack of pressure to put through the not water (So now instead of the bath "running off" all the hot water and the bather getting cold instead, now he gets nothing!). I certainly don't want to go through the expense of having a pump fitted if the problem is a ball valve (The fixing of which by a local plumber would be an inexpensive job). We don't have central heating.