Plumbers & electricians in Bexleyheath

The Broadway sits in the middle with Danson Park below it, and around both of them are street after street of interwar semis: bay fronted, three bedrooms, a bathroom over the hall, an airing cupboard on the landing and a loft that was never meant to hold anything heavier than a suitcase.

Housing built to one pattern at one time ages to one pattern as well. Almost everything here was originally plumbed the same way, and the things that go wrong ninety years later go wrong in the same order.

Why the shower is disappointing in a Bexleyheath semi

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The original arrangement in these houses is a cold tank in the loft, a hot cylinder in the airing cupboard, and gravity doing the rest. Gravity is generous downstairs and mean upstairs, because the pressure at any tap depends on how far it sits below the tank. A shower on the first floor of a two storey house has barely a couple of metres of head to work with, and that is why it dribbles.

None of the usual fixes people try address that. A new shower head is a new shower head. What actually changes it is either a pump fitted to the hot and cold feeds, or converting the system so the shower runs off mains pressure instead.

Both are real jobs with real consequences for the rest of the house, and which one is right depends on the incoming main, the cylinder and what else is fed off the tank. It is worth a proper look before spending money, because the wrong answer here is an expensive way to keep the same shower.