Timeline for Are water boilers dangerous when showering?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 21, 2018 at 16:30 | comment | added | user1908704 | The basic ones, as shown in the video above, have three heat settings (0/1/2) and adjust temperature by the user adjusting the water flow. The 0/1/2 controls how many heating coils are turned on, and the water flow then provides finer grained control. These aren't always the same size, but 3-5kW each wouldn't be far off. 10kW isn't actually a whole lot so a hot shower often turns into a trickle of water. A lukewarm trickle would be one 3-5kW coil. | |
| Nov 20, 2018 at 0:21 | comment | added | Omu | @user1908704 wow, wonder how many watts it will use if you only need slightly warm (close to lukewarm) water and not a very strong flow | |
| Nov 19, 2018 at 18:39 | comment | added | user1908704 | @Omu Yes. For example, this is 10.8kW: screwfix.com/p/… and this is what's inside a similar one: youtube.com/watch?v=ZwuhFLsowRc | |
| Nov 19, 2018 at 18:25 | comment | added | Omu | 9000W are you sure ? | |
| Apr 28, 2016 at 13:16 | comment | added | keshlam | On-demand hearing certainly makes sense in many applications. Putting the heater inside the shower enclosure, as I see it, seems to be begging for trouble unless it is triple-insulated, grounded, _and_on a GFCI.Especially surprising in a country where many bathroom light fixtures are operated by a ceiling,-mounted switch controlled by a non-conductive cord; that seems a bad case of mixed messages. | |
| Apr 17, 2016 at 12:56 | comment | added | user1908704 | @keshlam they have other advantages over stored hot water: in a stored system, you guess how much hot water you will use, heat it and it sits in a big tank until you use it. Depending on the quality of the insulation of the tank and pipes, there can be substantial losses (many houses have an 'airing cupboard' intended for drying clothes using heat from those losses). An electric shower only heats the water you need. While electricity costs more than gas, the electric shower only heats the water you use. In this house the landlord replaced a tank-fed shower with an electric one as less hassle | |
| Apr 17, 2016 at 8:30 | comment | added | Chris H | @Xen2050 at least until recently electric showers were commonly fitted without GFCIs. Electrocution from them is unheard of, with a few exceptions for criminally bad installations when the issue is the wiring not the shower. | |
| Apr 17, 2016 at 8:28 | comment | added | Chris H | @keshlam they have a big advantage over long runs of hot water pipe that take ages to run hot. It also means that in a stored hot water system (common in the UK) you don't run out of hot water half way through a shower and get good pressure. Why this house was built 20 years ago with an electric shower the other side of a wall from the hot water tank is a mystery though. | |
| Apr 17, 2016 at 7:28 | comment | added | Xen2050 | That's a rather scary thought, 9,000 watts of electricity practically within reach inside a shower. Those GFCI breakers can & do fail, sometimes (often?) just from being old | |
| Apr 17, 2016 at 1:07 | comment | added | keshlam | I was completely confused the first time I saw one of those; I would at least have expected it to be mounted outside the shower enclosure to avoid risk of a failed case seal and so they could heat water for the sink too... I presume these evolved as a retrofit for houses that predate plumbed hot water, as an alternative to opening walls and redoing all the pipes. | |
| Apr 17, 2016 at 0:26 | review | First posts | |||
| Apr 17, 2016 at 0:37 | |||||
| Apr 17, 2016 at 0:22 | history | answered | user1908704 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |