Choosing a suitable shower system for your home can be quite a challenge unless you know the type of water system in your home and how it works. Before choosing an electric or a mixer shower, it's important to decide whether you want to use your home water system or not.
Every home functions differently, some have plenty of hot water on demand plus a good level of water pressure; while others need their hot water stored & run out quickly, esp. if there’s a high water demand. Keeping this in mind can help you make the right decision.
Electric Showers
If you don’t want to use your household hot water system then opting for an electric shower can be the right choice. Electric showers come with different electrical power ratings so it’s necessary to check your current electricity supply, cable and fuse size are compatible with the requirements of the shower before buying one. These showers are ideal for large families that want to shower one after another. Also, they heat cold water instantly so you don’t need to worry about running out of hot water or waiting to heat it.
So how do electric showers work? The basic concept of an electric shower is that cold water enters the pipe at the left, flows past the coiled heating element (red) in the center, and leaves as hot water on the right. It works like electric toasters and hair dryers and sends electric currents through heating elements. It has moderate resistance and gets hot when electricity moves through it fast. The next feature is thermostatic control, wherein you can adjust the temperature by turning a dial, which is marked with a scale running from blue (for cold) to red (for hot).
In basic electric showers, the dial adjusts the flow for water streams to pass the heating element, making the water colder or hotter. In other showers, pressure-balancing valves, a built-in water mixing tanks, various thermostats, and flow sensors keep the temperature and water pressure safe. In wintertime, the incoming temperature might drop and in summers it gets ten degrees hotter. It's difficult for a shower to maintain a water flow rate and a constant water temperature perennially.
Mixer Showers
Those who want to use their household hot water systems will often choose a mixer shower to meet their needs. Mixer showers are compatible with almost any water system present in your household including gravity-fed systems and other high-pressure systems. Better known for their reliability and resistance to limescale is apt for people living in hard water areas. It mixes hot and cold water to prevent tap-twiddling for the right temperature. These showers automatically adjust to maintain constant temperatures when a tap is turned on in the house. It prevents people from getting scalded by hot or cold water. They can be exposed to the pipework mounted onto the wall or concealed providing a minimalistic design.
How do mixer showers work?
It operates on the simple mechanism of mixing hot and cold water from different pipes to churn warm water whose temperature is in between. The most basic form of mixer shower is a Y-shaped rubber pipe that you fit over the hot and water faucets (taps) on a bath-tub. You can get the desired temperature by merely adjusting the faucets and getting a single clear stream of water. But if someone switches on a cold faucet or flushes a toilet elsewhere in your home, the cold water supply is suddenly reduced. That means there's proportionally more hot water coming through your shower and, if the water's too hot, you could be scalded. The converse happens when someone switches on a hot faucet.
However, mixer showers that are plumbed into walls overcome this issue by using built-in thermostats. They constantly adjust the temperature of the mixed water to ensure you're not boiled like a lobster or frozen like a penguin by water that's alternately too hot or too cold. Most mixer showers also have safety cut-outs that prevent you from turning the water up to dangerously high levels, which is good news if they're being used by frail elderly people or young children. But there's still a basic problem with mixer showers: they typically run off hot water from a tank. Once the tank is empty, there's no more hot water and you have to wait for the tank to fill up before you can shower again.
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