Advice needed: Taps that can handle high pressure?

[RedRaven]

Hi guys -

The house I just bought has pretty high mains water pressure... the water authority's tank is only 200m away and up the hill behind us.

Problem is, the missus can't use the shower properly - you only need to turn the taps by maybe 3/4 of an inch to get more than enough (hot or cold) and she's not strong enough to turn the taps off again afterward... so it drips.

Other taps in the house seem okay, although the laundry tub needs turning off reasonably hard. Kitchen and bathroom are on those single lever type mixers, rather than individual taps.

Help?

[wonderplumb]

Mate it sounds like they simply need a good service, use soft turn washers, not the black dome type but the orange ones. A re-seat on the tap bodies wouldnt hurt either.

[zelig]

If you're sure it's due to high pressure (have you used a gauge to measure it?) then i'd recommend a "Boundary pressure limiting valve" at the meter.

http://www.relianceworldwide.com.au/files/spec_sheets/bplv.pdf

[Ianab]

Yup, we had one of those pressure reducing valves on our farm water supply. The main pump was running a bit over 150psi to get water to the back of the farm, but the house was only ~20ft above the pump shed.
One of those valves reduced the pressure on the house feed line to about 50psi which was still plenty of pressure without the pipes bursting :oo:

Cheers

Ian

[seriph1]

Advice from my Plumber - people have been complaining in Melbourne about crappy Chinese taps that fail after only a few weeks use .... guess what? No PLV's installed, is the issue almost always apparetnly.... Meter-level PLV is the way to go .... you can buy PLV's for each outlet if you want, but it is cheaper and a lot easier to do it at the meter.