Hey:

I am trying to solve a problem of very hot water pressure, but am a volunteer weekend plumber with limited skills.

The problem is that the hot water pressure in a washroom building at a summer camp is too low to have a decent shower. There are two sides in the building - 4 toilets, 4 showers and four sinks on each side of the building.

This is what we have checked already:

- pressure into the building is excellent

- pressure into the hot water tank and coming out of the top outlet of the tank is excellent;

- we changed the hot water piping to a couple of showers to see if they were clogged, but piping is fine;

- when we changed the piping we turned on the hot water before reassembling the pipe closest to the showerhead and there was decent pressure;

- cold water pressure at the shower pressure is decent so I assume this means the showerheads are not plugged;


Questions:

These are the two things I can't figure out, but there may be a more obvious solution:

- given that pressure to the tap that turns the shower off and on appears to be OK, is it possible that the valve is designed to limit hot water flow but not cold? Changing the valve means removing a delicate wall covering, so don't really want to the try this until I have ruled out other potential problems;


- is it unusual to have the pipe coming off the hot water tank to be split into two directions - one to the girl's section and the other to the boy's section but have the boy's and girl's sections connected together at the far end of the building so the hot water runs in a continuous circle connected to the one outlet at the top of the hot water tank?

Thanks for reading - any advice you can offer will be much appreciated.

We tried a few more things this evening to figure out the problem:


1. We put a hose on the drain for the hot water tank and timed how long it took to fill a bucket - decent pressure and 47 seconds. Then we took the pipe off the outlet from the hot water tank and attached the same hose - decent pressure and just 41 seconds to fill the bucket - the outlet pipe is large than the drain valve. It is fair to conclude that the hot water tan is not the problem.


2. We broke the circular water flow between the girl's and boy's washrooms by cutting the inlet pipe in the girl's washroom and capping it. Hot water can no longer flow from the tank outlet to both the girl's and boy's side and then return to the outlet on the tank. Sadly, this appeared to make no difference.


3. There are four showers on the boy's side and in Shower 1 there is a capped pipe for each of the shower units. We removed the cap on all four units and cold water flow was good, but almost no hot water flow.


The problem still remains - all four showers on the boy's side have almost no hot water flow - showers are unusable. On the girl's side 3 of the 4 showers are OK - not great - the 4th has almost no hot water flow - unusable.


The shower taps on each of the boy's showers are identical as are the shower heads. The girl's shower taps are different from the boy's but all four are identical.

Thanks for reading.


Any ideas out there?

Type and size of piping?

Brands/models of all shower valves ?

Pictures of everything..shower valves, water heater, piping etc...........

Thanks for your interest.

Pics and more info to follow, but left the camp today for the job that pays - will take a couple of weeks.