Bath stove
A water heater is an unpressurized displacement boiler with a capacity of 80 liters of water and usually serves for heating water bath or shower, by the way of classic water heater also heats the bathroom.
Newer bath stoves are made of enamelled sheet steel, older models are also made of copper sheet. The combustion chamber is located under the vertical water tank and the smoke pipe leads through it. A Kelly Kettle also works according to this principle on a much smaller scale .
There is a mixer tap on the lower side of the water tank that directs cold water into the boiler when hot water is required. The cold water pushes the hot water in the kettle upwards. The hot water then flows freely from the upper part of the boiler to the permanently open outlet of the mixer tap, which forms the outlet into the bathtub . Here there is often a switch valve to an attached hose shower. If the boiler heats the water, it expands. This is why small amounts of water come out of the mixer tap's spout, which is permanently open as mentioned above. For this reason, the connection between the outlet and the boiler must not be blocked.
As a rule, bath stoves are heated with solid fuels (coal or wood) and thus also heat the bathroom. Devices fired with heating oil or gas are rarer. Bath stoves can therefore only be set up where there is a connection to a chimney nearby, which is often no longer the case in the bathrooms of many new buildings.
Even if today's apartments mostly have running hot water, classic bath stoves are still being manufactured and sold in Germany. The copper hammer and pump maker Johann Vaillant is considered to be the inventor of the bath stove .
Pressureless bath stoves were popular in the period after the Second World War, as they could be used to set up (retrofit) bathrooms in old buildings. In addition, all solid fuels that could be found could be burned and operation was also possible where there was no gas line or a sufficiently powerful power connection.
There are also, albeit less often, bath stoves under pressure, the installation of which was much more demanding, but which had the advantage that the bath stove did not have to be located directly next to the bathtub, and several draw-off points (e.g. bathtub and Kitchen sink) possible.
Web links
- Solid-state bath heater - a modern offer: Robusta bath heater ( memento from September 24, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) by the Ahlen-based company Kaldewei from its production in Greece