My old sterling europa 23years old ! The water heater runs on gas and electric. Water gets very hot but after about 2 minutes runs cold driving me nuts. We are having new bathroom fitted but delays have meant using caravan for shower and loo but the water doesn’t stay hot long enough to dip your toe in. Can anyone help thanks
Possibly... the water is a mixture of hot water from the heater and cold water from the outside water container. In summer, the cold water is probably 20 deg but in winter is closer to say 5 deg. That means you will need approx. 4 times as much hot water as you do in summer to get a warm shower and you probably want the shower hotter in winter than in summer.
It's normal to switch the flow off when not using it.
Wet hair, switch off. Shampoo etc.
Rinse hair and body,. Switch off.
Rinse body. Switch off.
Hi there thanks to both of you for answers. I will empty and refill see if that helps. Is this because air in the heater stops it from filling up full with water. I left the heater on for over two hours and literally it was cold after a couple of minutes
So what your saying is switch off the hot water at the shower tap in between to conserve hot water?
Surely you should be getting enough hot water for a quick shower. Is this the norm for all caravan showers sorry I don’t know bit of a novice
Thanks
The carver cascade only holds a certain amount of water, I think about 7 litres, so once that is gone you will have to wait util it heats up again. It's certainly not like at home. The only thing it has in common with home is the fact that as you draw hot water from it, the pump replaces it with cold. In winter the water that replaces the hot will be very cold, so the tank will cool much quicker than it would in summer, as Navver points out.
With ours I found that the water heated up quite quickly, but there isn't really that much of it, which is why we always use the site facilities whenever possible and just use the caravan's hot water for washing up and hand washing. Our Carver broke last year so I have replaced it with an all-electric Propex heater, but I won't have any more water than I had with the Carver. How long it takes to heat up I have yet to find out as we haven't used the caravan since I replaced it.
Quote: Originally posted by Benahavis on 03/2/2022
Hi there thanks to both of you for answers. I will empty and refill see if that helps. Is this because air in the heater stops it from filling up full with water. I left the heater on for over two hours and literally it was cold after a couple of minutes
So what your saying is switch off the hot water at the shower tap in between to conserve hot water?
Surely you should be getting enough hot water for a quick shower. Is this the norm for all caravan showers sorry I don’t know bit of a novice
Thanks
when you first put water to your caravan, you need to remove all the air from both the cold pipes and then the hot. to do this you need to fill your aquaroll and go to the bathroom shower and run that until the air stops spurting and spitting on the cold, then check with the sink and then the kitchen sink, then do the same with the hot water, keeping a close eye on the water level on the aquaroll (handy to have 2 of them fully filled before starting this)
if you havent done any of this, then the sort of issues your experiencing will happen because the hot water heater will not be correctly filled with water.
once everything is running ok, the water heater can then be turned on.
to get a shower its a case of turn on shower to get the temp correct, stand under it turn to get wet then switch off while you soap yourself, turn back on to rinse off. this uses the least mount of water you can, and without hair washing its possible to get 2 showers from the one tank of hot water from the heater, without doing any of this you will be lucky to get rinsed off unless you dont mind cold water!
Quote: Originally posted by Benahavis on 04/2/2022
Hi again. If we can move the caravan outside the house is it possible to use a hose from the hot water tap in the house directly into the caravan
Not really, as there is nowhere really to connect it to. The equipment in the caravan is not designed to cope with the pressure of a domestic supply, and there is only one water inlet and that is for cold water. It splits into hot and cold once inside. You can get an adapter (pressure reducer) designed to take a cold supply into the caravan from a standpipe, but if you connected a hot supply to it you would have hot water coming from all your caravan taps, hot and cold. Not really a viable proposition in my opinion.
I think another reason is that in a house with a hot water cylinder, cold water goes into the bottom under pressure from a header tank above. Hot water is pushed out by the cold entering and it is pushed out of the top of the cylinder.
The cylinder is usually about 4 feet tall or so so the clod stays at the bottom because its heavier than the hot, and being so far from the top doesn't reach that high.
In a caravan store is about 1 foot high and I'm not convinced the cold enters at the bottom and hot exits at the top. So I think the hot and cold mix a lot more than in the house system,
I think most folk switch the water off in the shower when not using it because they have to carry it to the van and away from the van. The less they use the better.
Quote: Originally posted by navver on 04/2/2022
I think another reason is that in a house with a hot water cylinder, cold water goes into the bottom under pressure from a header tank above. Hot water is pushed out by the cold entering and it is pushed out of the top of the cylinder.
The cylinder is usually about 4 feet tall or so so the clod stays at the bottom because its heavier than the hot, and being so far from the top doesn't reach that high.
In a caravan store is about 1 foot high and I'm not convinced the cold enters at the bottom and hot exits at the top. So I think the hot and cold mix a lot more than in the house system,
I think most folk switch the water off in the shower when not using it because they have to carry it to the van and away from the van. The less they use the better.
On the new water heater I have just installed in my caravan, the cold water does enter near the bottom and the hot exits near the top, but there is no more than 6 inches between them. Mixing must be almost instant. The Carver heater it replaced was very little different really. Even though both heaters heat around 8 litres of water, I doubt whether you would get more than 3 or 4 litres of truly hot water out of either because of the introduction of cold water to push the hot out.
It’s a tiny tank, compared to a cistern at home: we had one in our previous MH. Try filling a few jugs with the amount of water that’s been stated, and see how little it is when you pour it out in your sink. It doesn’t go far.
Run a sink of hot water with a squirt of shower gel in it & have a strip wash with a wet flannel. You’d be shaving at a sink anyway, surely. Or, as suggested, have a “submariner’s shower” when your hair needs washing.
Or go to your local swimming pool & get fit at the same time. If it’s like our pool though, the showers are communal & you keep your cozzie on, so it doesn’t feel like a real shower.
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