Ok - I am sure this has been done before, but with no search, what can I say…
I just moved into a new house. Villa’s villa, perchance. Two story row home with a basement, full bath on the top floor, shower in the basement. The water pressure in the full bath sucks, and is not too great in the basement either.
What can I do to improve this? I know there are a couple of ways to up the shower pressure (new head, remove the water regulator) but I also want to take care of the speed at which the water comes out into the tub upstairs.
We were having a problem with leaks and called a plumber. He told us that the water pressure to the house was pegging the water meter. He adjusted the pressure at the meter to bring it down to an acceptable level.
I would strongly advise having a qualified plumber do this. Messing with the water meter is something you shouldn’t do lightly.
Is it in fact a pressure problem, or is it a flow problem? People often say pressure when the actual problem is a lack of flow. You can check this by buying a pressure tester from a plumbing store, I think I paid less than $10 for the last one I bought.
If your house has galvanized pipes, they can get deposits on the inside that dramatically cut the flow. I have cut out 6 inch long sections of pipe that you cannot see through for all of the deposits. :eek:
The answer is to replace the pipes if this is the case. IMHO copper is the way to go.
Being a new home, I wonder if debris was in the pipes and it’s been flushed to the filter screens from initialization of use. Have you unscrewed the fixture ends and checked those screens yet? Not that you don’t have a pressure issue but this is an easy first check.
Go to the home improvement store and snag one of the free pamphlets on how install lawn sprinklers. Then get a pressure guage - they’re probably within ten feet of the instructions. They’ll have a section on how to use a pressure gauge and how to time filling a bucket to determing pressure and flow.
Pressure should be more or less the same everywhere in the house. How is the flow at an outdoor hose faucet vs a bathtub? Tub faucets usually give pretty well unrestricted flow, as opposed to sink faucets with aerators. If the flow rates are wildly different, you’ve probably got some wicked scale build-up in the pipes, or there’s a pressure regulator that needs adjusting. I’ve even seen where something heavy had been leaned against the wall in the basement, and the main water line was simply squashed to the point of restricting flow.
On my house, for example, the outdoor hose faucets and the internal fire sprinklers get full street pressure of 125-150 psi. As this would blow an unsuspecting person across the room when they went to brush their teeth, the regulator is set for 70 psi, which is appropriate for in-house use. Typical in-house pressure should be in the 50-70 psi range.
If your house has a separate regulator, you can adjust it on your own. Mine looks more or less like this one - to change the pressure, just turn the knurled end-cap. If you don’t have a separate regulator, it’s probably part of the meter, which I wouldn’t advise messing with. In this case, call the local water utility - they’re more likely to want to schedule someone to come by and check it, than to have someone call in a panic because they broke the meter and water’s shooting out.
Looks like next weekend is a trip for a pressure gauge. I admit I have no clue if it is pressure or flow. All I know is the tub takes for ever to fill, and the shower upstairs does not adequately cleanse shampoo from my flowing locks.
The piping from the meter to the house is a potential suspect as well. My house was built in about 1960 and had galvanized pipe from the meter to the faucets. When our flow problems got so bad we couldn’t shower and wash clothes at the same time it turned out to be the outside pipe. It had degraded and developed tiny leaks through the whole 50’ length and had to be completely replaced. Not cheap. My neighbor, whose house was built at about the same time, had the same issue. I have great flow now (and so does the house!).
Before spending anything look for something that looks like this here item it will usually be right “downstream” of your main inline shutoff but it varies depending on if they wanted higher pressure still somewhere else. If you have one, post the information you can get off the tag/visible and I may be able to find the correct way to turn the screw. If you are a DIYer at all you can turn up the pressure from there and see if that helps. Second hand, a friend of ours recently spent more money than needed trying to fix the exact same problem, turns out the prior homeowners where just happy with the low pressure so they had it turned down.
This sounds like a flow issue, but a pressure gauge will tell for sure. Forty five lbs seems to ring a bell as a good minimum, max should be no more than about 70 lbs.
The pressure will be the same everywhere in the house. The flow might vary, but with all the faucets turned off, the static pressure will be constant at all points in the system. With a faucet flowing, the dynamic pressure might vary, but the static never will.
PEX is unaffected by aggressive water, can be pulled through building walls in a manner similar to large diameter electrical cable, and requires fittings only at terminations/transitions. No chemicals or heat are used at those fittings, as they rely on the memory of the product to produce a watertight fit. Uponor, formerly known as Wirsbo has produced these systems for decades in Europe, and they are slowly catching on in the US.
Since the tub takes a long time too, this can’t be your only problem, but: our shower started flowing less and less a couple years after we moved into our house, and got to the point that it was a fairly useless dribble (it really sucks when the water is nice and hot, but you’re still cold because there’s so little of it coming out). A friend told me that a good way to clean hard water deposits out of the shower head is to take it off and soak it in vinegar overnight. Worked like a charm. Shower flow good as new.
So when you get your main water pressure/flow sorted out, you might try that too if your shower head is still slow.
Thanks for all the suggestions here. As soon as work calms down, I am going to reinvestigate. Though this mornings shower in the basement was pretty good, so I have no clue what is happening.
Since you have an older house, it’s most likely build-up in your pipes. One caveat I will say to the advice given here. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do about it. Our house was totally gutted and renovated last year. All new copper pipe, new pipe out to the road. Nothing old in the whole place. And our pressure sucks. Why? Because we’re on a community well. So the pressure varies as eveyone else is using water. Plus while we replaced the pipes from the road to the house, I can’t speak to the condition of the pipes that run through the rest of the neighborhood. So I’m stuck with water pressure that comes and goes depending on the time of day or which day it is. So I wait until the city puts the main water line out to our place and put up with a shower that will go from great pressure to crappy fairly often.
Couldn’t you install a cold water tank (a gas-charged accumulator) (and a check valve upstream of it) to help out during the slack times? My dad had one in his house, to keep the pump from turning on and off constantly.
