In the US for example the standard is 110V for voltage and 80psi for water. In Europe, voltage is 220V, is water pressure different there too?
Water operates more like DC voltage so there isn’t really a need for a standard. You just need enough to get to your shower head.
That’s an interesting analogy. But just like too much current can melt a wire, I would assume there’s some upper limits to keep it from bursting pipes and fittings?
I think it’s 80psi/20psi to code.
But which regions code are you referring to?
US. I’d be surprised if anywhere was allowing more than 80psi.
20psi is really low so this value may have different variations. I’m on a well pump and before I replaced it I was getting down to 20psi. It barely dribbled out of the 2nd floor shower head. I now have the pump set to 60/40 with a 50psi restriction valve. This seems to be the sweet spot.
I’m not in plumbing and won’t know how to look this stuff up.
Afaik water pressure is variable based on each city’s design needs.
Everyone else is focusing on whether the rest of the world uses metric and not that fact that water pressure at a given faucet or shower head will be governed by bernoullis equation which will take 99 things into account such as:
The max height of the water reservoir
The height of your faucet
The design of the pipes leading from the reservoir to your faucet
Air pressure
The pumps in the system
Etc
Australia uses kilopascals rather than PSI. Our standard is 500kPa which works out at around 72 PSI.
Not European, but I think they might not use PSI since that’s Pounds per Square Inch. I believe they use Pascals/ Bar.
In Germany at least I think th most popular unit is Bar
Portugal is the same.
Doesn’t really matter the unit of measurement. Kinda like hp/ps or lb-ft/nm, there are equivalents. I’m more interested in the values, but you do have a valid point there.
My house is operating at around 3,5-4 bar after the pressure regulator. Since I have no gauge I can‘t deliver the pressure of the supply. I guess it is around 6 bar. Small town in Germany.
We also have mandatory check valves since a couple of years to prevent water from entering the supply from the buildings in case the pressure drops.
It’s 120V and 240V
Is that substantial though or is it like calling 120V something like 110V/115V?
It doesn’t matter one bit. The actual voltage from the wall varies, and devices are build to operate under a fairly wide margin.
It’s 230V in Europe.
What genius decided to denote the difference by using three shades of the exact same colour?
The most common one is bar. 1 bar is roughly the atmospheric pressure.
An older German unit was atü, 0 atü is atmosperic pressure
Edit: sorry I misunderstood the question
So, a hole in a bucket? Doesn’t sound right.
Gauge pressure not absolute
Ahh yup.
In europe they mostly use Bars as the unit of measurement.
Mostly water pressure is around 1-2 bars as a minimum, but there are still places using different standards, for example the old style gravity-fed UK watersystems with sub 1 bar pressure, but those are not very common anymore.
Most domestic sanitary products in the EU are designed to be used on 1-5 bar pressure.
I read somewhere the domestic water pressure to be between 4-6 bar, however not sure how realistic it is accross the whole EU and also what you got at the mains and what you got when opening the faucet is two different numbers.
A bar is 100,000 Pa or 100.000 Pa. Why not use KPa? Why set a separate unit to be 1E+05?
Because 1 bar is almost atmospheric pressure. Oddly enough I’ve never seen anyone use kPa, weather forecasts often use hPa (instead of mbar) to report atmospheric pressure.
No idea what is the story behind it, or if there is a practical reason.
Will any pressure below 1 bar work at all? Wont it just suck the air in instead?
These pressures are all gauge pressure, not absolute pressure. 1 bar gauge pressure would be about 2 bar absolute.
The gravity systems in this case are not pressurized. They just have a water tank in the loft/airing cupboard and the hight of the tank determines the pressure. 0.1 bar for every 1 meter height. You open the faucet and gravity pushes out the water.
Its a nightmare, I used to live in UK and these systems are barely enough for anything really.
