Thermostatic shower valve - water too hot
 

Hello,

I've just installed an Ibtorbre shower/bath mixer, but am having
trouble getting an acceptable temperature. Even with the temp set to
it's lowest setting, the water is still too warm. It has a pair of
valves that look adjustable, the instructions make no mention of these
though. Can anyone offer any advice? It's supplied by a 2 bar pump.
I'm fairly sure the cold supply is fine (the flow valve only operates
on the cold side).

Thanks

Mark

Zippy wrote:
Hello,

I've just installed an Ibtorbre shower/bath mixer, but am having
trouble getting an acceptable temperature. Even with the temp set to
it's lowest setting, the water is still too warm. It has a pair of
valves that look adjustable, the instructions make no mention of these
though. Can anyone offer any advice? It's supplied by a 2 bar pump.
I'm fairly sure the cold supply is fine (the flow valve only operates
on the cold side).

Beware that some screws on thermostatic valves are factory set and
I've heard dire warnings about tampering with such settings.
However, this may be fine on your mixer, so please take my caution
with reasonable suspicion.

Could there be a blockage on the cold supply to the mixer?
When doing a new installation they always tell you to flush the
pipework before you add the final mixer so that all the crud doesn't
end up in the nice new unit.

On my standard mixer unit (not the same as yours) you can reassemble
it with the control skewed off to the hot side.
Therefore, even turning it down to full cold doesn't make the
shower run cold.
I'm presuming that's what happened with the previous owner,
because when I moved in the twit had replumbed the cold supply
to the shower
so that instead of coming from the cold loft cistern it came from
the mains.

This meant that the balance was all off: hot from tank, cold from
mains.
Eventually after much puzzling I cleaned the filters, reset the
skewed control and re-plumbed the cold back to the cistern.
And it's been magic for 7 years now.

HTH

Mungo

Thanks for that, but the solution turned out to be a touch of brute
force. In frustration I gave the temp control a very firm twist - and
obviously freed something off, because then it continued to turn twice
more, giving me cold water!

Thanks

Mark

Hi

When I moved home, I had the same problem with a "twin control thermostatic shower valve" (unbelievably, the user's manual does not have the name of the manufacturer!). The minimum temperature was already too hot.

The thermostatic cartridge (that actually mixes the waters) is able to do 2 complete turns between hot and cold, however the handle can only turn once due to its safety lock (where you have to press a button to override the maximum temperature).

To fix this I removed the handle, manually turned the thermostatic cartridge to a "colder" position, and put the handle back.

This was a simple thing, without the need to close service valves.