Safe and comfortable showering in multi-storey apartment blocks can present low water pressure technical issues, but residents of three adjacent residential towers in Chester are enjoying the luxury of safe, thermostatically controlled showering with specially adapted Inta Plus showers from Intatec.

The new installation is part of a £1.14m per year bathroom investment programme by Chester & District Housing Trust under their decent homes initiative. The trust is re-furbishing up to 450 bathrooms per year, replacing the existing showers with anti-scald TMV2 compliant bar type shower valves.

Intatec's Graham Hughes has worked with the housing trust to adapt a standard Inta shower to suit this particular application. He said; "The top floors of multi-storey buildings can suffer from low water pressure - the lower floors from high pressure. With a project like this, the same shower unit needs to be able to cope with high and low pressure, so it can be fitted anywhere in the building. Our Inta plus shower has an operating range of 0.1 bar to 5 bar and the water pressures in these buildings range from approximately 0.5 bar to 2 bar, so a standard Inta Plus shower is more than capable. What makes the Chester & District showers unique is the addition of integral flow restrictors, which mean every shower in the block delivers the same good flow rate and excellent showering experience without wasting water.

Ian Shaw of Chester & District Housing Trust who is managing the project said; "We manage specification carefully on all our projects to ensure that we achieve appropriate performance from the equipment we fit. Intatec were recommended to us by another housing trust in the later stages of our planning. We have been delighted with not only the company's flexibility to provide us with a shower exactly to our specification, but also to have them on site in a relatively short lead time. Changing our original specification to Inta Plus has also shown a significant cost saving to the Trust, which we plan to re-invest back into our communities

Mrs Norma Bramhill, a resident in one of the apartment blocks is delighted with her new shower and the team who installed it. She said; "It's a great shower, plenty of pressure and I think the anti-scald feature is brilliant.