How To Choose The Right Shower

When designing or redesigning your bathroom, the right shower hardware is a critical part of ensuring that your bathroom not only looks good but provides the perfect refreshing bathing experience.

Given that a bathroom must be both practical and aesthetically pleasing, here is a primer on how to choose and fit the right shower for your home.

Choose Your Shower Type

There are two main types of shower, but which ones are ideal for you and your home will vary based on the type of water system you have in your home, which often depends on when the house was built.

Older homes usually have two tanks; they feature a header tank and a hot water cylinder tank, which is the tank found next to the boiler in the airing cupboard. This is the traditional boiler system but is one that is being rapidly replaced by combination boilers that provide hot water on demand.

Depending on how quickly your boiler can heat water and the water pressure available to you will determine whether a mixer shower is the right choice for you compared to an electric shower.

A mixer shower combines both hot and cold water supplies, sometimes with a pump to help add water pressure, with more modern versions featuring thermostatic controls to keep the water at a certain temperature and avoid sudden flashes of hot or cold water whenever someone else runs a tap.

Alternatively, electric showers are available that use a high-capacity electrical supply on their own dedicated circuits. Whilst inherently slightly less efficient than a mixer shower, they never run out of hot water, are cheaper and only heat what they need to use, making them more economical when in use.

Choose Your Showerhead

Once you have the practical part of the shower decided, the next step is to choose the showerhead, as the type and placement will determine the type of enclosure, tray and other design elements.

The most common type is a handheld shower head that is mounted onto a slider rail, which can be used either as an adjusted mounted shower or moved around the body.

As well as these, you have fixed heads that are mounted onto the wall, heads that are mounted onto the ceiling or body jets, which spray water at different parts of the body.

Even if you get a fixed shower head, most types will also include a handheld showerhead as a secondary option, primarily to help rinse out and clean the shower itself.

One point to bear in mind is that the larger the showerhead, the more water pressure you will need to maintain a consistent flow of water.

Choose Over-Bath Or Enclosure

One of the consistent debates in the world of bathing is whether it is better to have a bath or a dedicated shower enclosure, but in practice, it is a matter of taste and practicality. Many bathrooms are too small to have both, so an over-bath shower with a glass shower screen is an effective compromise.