Water Heating

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UlsterRugby

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Hi - I have a MH with a Truma water heating system which also has a warm air heating system. It works great except tank size is only 12 litres. Pretty useless for a shower.

Is it possible to add an “on demand” water heater that would run the shower separately from the rest of the system?

Thanks in advance
 
Thanks Jev88. No offence taken 👍 but I am intrigued by your view that 12 litres should shower two people.

If we heat up the Truma, circa 25-30 minutes, and we keep the shower water pressure low, and we turn the water off once we have wet ourselves, and then soap up and turn water back on to rinse off we start to run cool as we are finishing just one shower.

I understand that an average shower uses between 9-12 litres per minute. Is this not correct?
 
That’s the way most do it. Wet, Turn off water, Soap, Rinse. I have no idea how much water is used running it non-stop for a shower would use, but way more than 12 ltr.
Our Truma needs a good hour to get up to temperature on leccy. Gas is much faster.
I think you are expecting too much from your system
 
Hi and welcome. Is your hot water really getting hot? if you have 12 litres of really hot water then add cold at the mixer tap then you probably have in the region of 18 + litres of shower water. which we can manage 2 showers from. thats when on gas.

i know if we are on electric water heat only then the water does not appear to get so hot.

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turn the hot water temperature up, give it extra time to heat up. They are not fast, think of it as a giant kettle on the hob, how long would that take? Add plenty of extra cold water to achieve temperature you require. Then do a sailors shower, as mentioned above. Plenty of water to shower 4 if done right
 
Thank you everyone for your excellent and incredibly fast responses. I’m really impressed.

The general consensus clearly indicates that I’m not running the system correctly and getting the water hot enough.

I will do a test run tomorrow and see if things improve.

Thank you all once again.
 
UlsterRugby said:
The general consensus clearly indicates that I’m not running the system correctly and getting the water hot enough.
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It sounds like it. The hot water should be at a sufficiently high temp that you have to mix cold with it to have a comfortable shower.
 
Your boiler should heat to about 70degC, that makes around 20L of water at 40degC when combined with cold. That’s two comfortable showers. We use about 15-16L for two showers.

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With ours the knob on the controls light up orange whilst it’s making hot water. We wait for this to go off before starting the showers. Also as others have said the water should be really hot when you do run a hot tap. We have two water temps to set our boiler too, and use the 60 (higher) one.
 
When I go in ours, I deliberately try and use all the hot water if we are about to go home.

I get bored before the water gets cold. It lasts for ages and we also have the 10l Truma.

We can almost shower all 4 of us on one tank if we are quick.
 
Good morning folks - following on from the class responses from you guys, I fired up the Truma boiler with the hottest setting possible (60C as LandyAndy mentioned) and waited until the light went out indicating that the water had been heated. I then ran the shower on, roughly half water pressure and mixed it so that it was warm enough for a shower. I ran it until it went pretty cool. I ran it constantly. Towards then end of the time I was having to reduce the cold water input to maintain any decent heat BUT it ran for a little under 6 minutes. This is a much greater position than we were in this past weekend.

Does this sound about right? It certainly is much better than we experienced previously so I am pretty pleased with the result.

So, many thanks to you all for such tremendous input, experiences and advice.
 
That sounds approximately right, but you leave the heater on and stop the water between rinses and it will extend the time the water lasts. Showering in a van is a compromise, like lots of other things, and the precious commodities of gas, water and battery power have to be carefully managed. Running out of any of those commodities will give serious issues and agro

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Try an ecocamel shower head, they don't use as much water but you still get a reasonable shower
 
Thanks folks. I will check out the shower head Brianmor. Thanks for the tip. Yeah TheBig1, we are learning the balancing act bit by bit. We are getting there. Thanks again guys
 
Put a pic of your shower head up, as would be interesting to see if it’s a low water type.

For us a boiler full is just enough for two showers with the tap at 50/50 hot and cold. Get wet, get soapy, get rinsed. In the summer we never run out of hot water, but winter trips we notice it as the water takes more to heat, and the cold that the hot is mixed with is colder, also hotter showers are wanted when colder.
 
Landy Andy will do tomorrow and thanks. Tombola I’m looking at similar here in France. Thanks for the link. With Brexit we get shafted on import duties and administrative expenses so it must be bought in Europe
 
Hi Simon, there seems to be a whole host of shower heads available. Thanks
 
Ecocamel do nice shower heads and available on eBay. I tried a “ball” one briefly then got an ecocamel one.
 
I’m actually looking at the Ecocamel as my preferred one

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Landry Andy - Ive attached photo of the shower head. I am certain its a bog standard one so I have ordered the Ecocamel Jet-stream head. I am sure this will also improve things for us too.
 

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We shower every morning and have no problem with a short break between the 2 showers. The trick with the Combi is to get the space heating up to temperature first and then shut it off whilst getting the water up to temperature. If the space heating is still running it sucks the heat out of the hot water tank. Our Combi has a boost setting which temporarily shuts off the space heating and pushes the water temperature up to 65°C. We do not have a special shower head we just turn off the shower whilst we soap ourselves. 5 to 10 minutes between showers is usually enough to get the water temperature back up to 65°C, quicker on gas than electricity which only has 2x900W elements.
 
One thing that's not been mentioned is limescale, if the boiler has been used in a hard water area it may have a build up of scale reducing the capacity, if so it's worth descaling it. We have a 10 ltr boiler and have no problems getting 2 showers with about 5 minutes in-between on gas or electric.
 
Now, that is a great thought The Ex-Gasman. Here, in France, limescale/hard water is a real problem. Any thoughts on how to descale the boiler? That would be very helpful sir.
 
UlsterRugby said:
Now, that is a great thought The Ex-Gasman. Here, in France, limescale/hard water is a real problem. Any thoughts on how to descale the boiler? That would be very helpful sir.
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there are several commercial de-scalers available or you can use vinegar, be careful not to leave it in too long, it's no different to de-scaling a kettle

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