What is water flow?
/Flow is the volume of water that travels past a certain point per minute.
Water boards aim to supply water 9 litres per minute. So a 4.5 litre (1 gallon bucket) will fill in 30 seconds.
Poor flow rate often leads to poor water pressure.
How does flow rate affect a shower?
Broadly speaking, the larger a shower head the more water flow is needed to maintain pressure. How much water your shower head needs should be supplied by the manufacturer. If the shower head required 10 litres per minute but your water system can only provide 9 litres per minute you’re not going to experience full power.
Water pump and shower pumps increase pressure but they can’t increase flow. This is the major advantage that a Proflow water booster has over a pump, is it makes more water avaialable to meet demand.
Pumps can push water into your shower header, but they can’t pull more water from the mains. If your mains supply is 9 litres per minute you’re never going to get more than 9 litres per minute out of your outlets.
Our boosters are essentially accumulator tanks that store a reserve of water for use when the demand is high.
Imagine you have 3 outlets in use:-
- Shower: 8 litres per minute
- Bathroom tap: 6 Litres per minute
- Washing machine filling: 5 litres per minute
Total demand: 19 litres per minute.
If you only have 9 litres per minute coming into the property from source, your demand in the above case would outstrip supply by 10 litres per minute. i.e. the system needs another 10 litres per minute to maintain the correct pressure. The result is that the pressure and flow will drop for all of these outlets. The outlet that will experience the biggest drop in pressure will be the one that is the highest. This is normally an upstairs shower, because of the height of the shower head, which is one of the worst places to loose water pressure.
The benefits of an Proflo water pressure booster accumulator tank
In the above example the system needs another 10 litres per minute. If we were to install a Proflo 200 litre accumulator tank you would have at least 20 minutes of additional water on standby. This would allow you to meet the demand of all the outlets and prevent that extra tap from affecting the shower pressure.
