Low shower pressure

Plumbing Forums

Help Support Plumbing Forums:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Sly

Member
Joined
Jul 16, 2011
Messages
17
Reaction score
0
Location
San Diego, California
Hi all,

Here's the thing. Low shower pressure. If I remove the cartridge, I have plenty of pressure at the handle. If I remove the shower head, no pressure. I had an issue with water softener with beads coming in the house at all faucet. So even if remove the shower head I have no pressure. Looks like the pipe from the handle/ cartridge to shower spout is blocked . I passed a snake from the shower spout down and all seems clear. Looks like the blockage is somewhere around the handle valve brass split that goes up to the head...

I changed the cartridge with no change.

If I blow (with my mouth) in the shower spout with main valve off and faucet open there is no or very little air passing through. Should I try compressed air or water? What else??

Thanks!
 
I have been in your situation I cut the riser right above the shower valve and I was able to blow through to the shower head, but not down to the shower valve, with the cartridge removed. I used compressed air. The reason the customer called was because there wasn't water coming out of the shower. So if full water pressure couldn't get the clog out, the air pressure couldn't. The port from the cartridge to the shower riser was clogged so I had to change the valve. That would be cool if you were able to unclog that port. Little mini snake or draino. I don't know
 
  • Like
Reactions: Sly
Is the riser port the middle hole between the 2 bigger ones? Pouring drano at the shower spout end down? How about CLR?

Thanks for the quick reply!
 
UPDATE: Tried Drano: didn't work. Tried CLR: worked! Sprayed some in the lower hole and poured some from the spout with cartridge in and let soaked for a little while and it work like a charm! Should have done that long time ago... Now, nice powerful shower....:D

Thanks gladiatormaniac!
 
I had an issue with water softener with beads coming in the house at all faucet.

...hmmph...

Were the beads from a regular salt based water softener or one of those newer salt-free conditioners that uses beads within an element insert in a filter style housing?

Just curious... :confused:
 
Had enough of the problems associated with hard water huh? My solution: Use a softener.

Hard water can be really challenging to deal with. It wastes soap because it takes much longer to lather. Hard water is not the best for drinking; well, it’s just too salty to quench one’s thirst. What’s more, hard water causes plug formation, rust, and scaling of appliances.

If you don’t know what that means, then just check through some old water pipe or other plumbing equipment that has been used with hard water for a while. With that being said, water filtration systems are equipment designed to help with demineralization of water. That is basically about removing excess calcium and magnesium salts that are actually what causes water hardness.

I have looked around for a while and found this site to be the best of help: https://www.waterfiltersystem.org/best-water-softeners/ It contains reviews on top shelf water filtration systems and most of all, it helps you decide what type of water softener you want, but you need to be quite careful with this, there are many type of water softeners. I will leave a list of them down here below:


- Salt free

- Ion exchange

- Reverse osmosis

- Magnetic


The site I linked goes into more detail about these types of softeners, just be sure to read about them well to make a choice on which one you want to buy.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top