Why Making Sure You Get The Right Bathroom Tap Is Important
Choosing the right tap (torneiras) for your bathroom can be a daunting prospect. There are many different types available, each with their own pressures and different forms of valves. You also need to take into account the type of bath or basin you have and the water system in your property. Choosing the wrong tap for your system can result in basin taps that don’t have a steady flow of water or bath taps that simply don’t work. So the most important part of buying a bathroom tap is to first find out the type of tap that your system will support.
Identifying Your Water System
You will either have a high pressure or low pressure water system in your home. Low pressure systems are common in older homes and usually consist of a cold water storage tank that is placed in a loft and a hot water cylinder in an airing cupboard. With this system you will normally need no more than 0.2 to 0.5 bar of pressure.
High pressure systems are combination boilers and are the most popular form of system installed in the your region today. They heat water as it is being used, so you don’t have to take up space with a cold or hot water tank. All the water passes through a wall or floor mounted boiler that is often exposed. This system has a pressure varying from 0.5 to 4 bars, but this depends on your location so you should always check the exact pressure using a pressure gauge.
In some cases you may have an unvented system, which means you will have hot water stored under pressure in a large cylinder somewhere in your house. This system is usually high pressure (1 to 4 bar) but to measure the exact pressure a pressure gauge needs to be used.
Which Tap Will Fit Your Water System
Once you have figured out what type of pressure system you have you can move on to choosing a tap to buy. Remember that if you have a low pressure system a tap with a pressure of 0.2 would do fine, but if you have a high pressure system you can choose between low pressure taps or high pressure taps. However, a high pressure tap will not work with a low pressure system so you need to be careful what you ultimately decide on.
Some taps have the type of valve that requires a high pressure system to function properly. This includes taps that have ‘ceramic disc technology’. This type of tap has two ceramic discs with matching slots that are placed over the end of the water feed pipe. The upper disc turns over the lower disc when the tap head is used, meaning that water will only flow when both the upper and lower disc slots match. The advantage of this system is that the taps are fully on with only a quarter of a turn of the tap head, so only light pressure is required to operate a tap. The reason why this requires a high pressure system to operate effectively is because it slows water flow through the valve itself, whereas a traditional tap will only require low pressure because it allows more water through the valve.
Summary
In summary make sure you find out what water system you have before searching for bathroom taps to buy. Secondly do your research into whether the tap you are looking at is low or high pressure. Remember that spending the time to pick the right bathroom tap will cost you less than finding out you’ve just wasted your money on a tap that won’t work properly.
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