I’m getting under 1 bar on the outside-tap-measuring thing I bought.
No wonder my shower’s ‘cycling’ hot & cold.
Is yours any better? Wondering whether there’s any point asking my water supplier if they can do anything..

Nope. My cold water tap in the kitchen is a trickle and I am on first floor flat. Apparently I was told the pressure is not strong enough … hmmm … always wonder if someone has messed with the tap. The bathroom is fine. I can only wash my car with buckets of water rather than pressure washer. I can but then I would have to use 25 metre hose.

Used to have really strong water pressure, the hosepipe was like a jet wash!
Then a new estate was built down the road and now it’s really weak, if you’re in the shower and someone turns on a tap, goes red hot!
Water company has been out and measured the pressure, it’s just above the minimum pressure, so nothing to be done

Hmm, just looked at what ‘minimum pressure’ they should provide is, 0.7 bar apparently, looks like I’m stuffed.

We had rubbish pressure, though nothing of it as we had moved to a house at the top of a hill.

Then realised all the taps are ‘mains pressure’, gradually changed them to low pressure/gravity fed types and now much better, bath fills in 10 minutes rather than 30!

Also, do not confuse pressure with flow rate. There is a minimum flow rate you should get as well, easy to check with a big measuring jug. We are just above the minimum threshold.

Kitchen tap is like a pressure washer, bath is utter rubbish, I should really look into it!

5 bar with me although its dropped slightly during summer. I need around 4 bar for filling up my pure water window cleaning system in the van.

dan77 – depending on your hot water setup you could have a pressure reducing valve which drops the pressure to the rest of the house. The kitchen tap, however, is often plumbed straight into the cold supply.

This valve has a filter which is supposed to be cleaned, or alternatively it’s been taken out and the calibration on the valve has been lost.

When we had our mains pipe replaced the guy doing it said it should be around 5 bar but there were so many leaks in the mains UU had dropped it to 2 bar.

That was a couple of years ago though so it may have changed*

*but I wouldn’t be surprised if it hadn’t.

You should be getting at least 1.5 bar static pressure and 9lpm at 1 bar, anything below this (measured at the boundary stop tap) is reportable to OFWAT as a failure of level of service. Get your water company to carry out a test at both the boundary and internally to compare the difference.

9 bar PRV reduces it to 4 bar to bring it to the house.

Then realised all the taps are ‘mains pressure’, gradually changed them to low pressure/gravity fed types and now much better, bath fills in 10 minutes rather than 30!

Didn’t know that.

All our taps seem to have huge pressure, doesn’t seem to matter if they’re on the mains or gravity systems. But some have piddly flow rates, the bath tap for example hits the bottom of the bath and sprays everywhere, but still takes ages to fill the bath.

My parents OTOH have those huge antique style taps, open them up and the bath is full in a couple of minutes, but there’s barely any pressure behind it (the electric shower is rubbish).

If you go to buy a tap you will see they are suited to difference pressures, a lot of the ceramic washer/quarter turn to fully open are suited to high pressure, i.e. there is only a small aperture within the tap to let the water flow through.

I think the replacements I bought were 0.5 bar, I got lucky though as bought a £150 basin mixer tap from B&Q’s discount bin for £25 as it was missing the nuts and washers and the mini tail/screw in pipes (swapped them from the existing tap) and then a year later I find a matching bath tap for £15 (was £225!) that I think was a customer return as it was also missing the instructions 🙂

Those two bargains compensated me for the high pressure bath tap I bought in error for our previous house five years earlier for £200 and had been sitting in the garage ever since!

Found a cheapish low pressure tap for the kitchen from Screwfix.

I couldn’t tell you the pressure, but I use the incoming stop cock to reduce flow from ‘crap, I am covered in tap splash back’ to ‘bath fills quick’. We also have a pressure balancing valve on the shower that seems to do all sorts, judging by the noises it makes when the shower is in use…

[video]http://youtu.be/fXfv3JbTAOA[/video]