Dana

Unknown pump history with four people on a 1200 gallon tank means it's overdue regardless of what the field is doing. Get it pumped and ask the operator to look at the baffles and tell you how thick the scum and sludge layers were. That single conversation is the most useful thing you'll get all year, and it sets your interval going forward.

Genuinely better. Pressure balance protects you from scalding by cutting the hot down, which means your shower gets weaker during the flush. Thermostatic holds the temperature and the flow, and it also handles the case where the water heater itself changes temperature, which pressure balance can't see at all.

The valve in that hotel is a plain mixer with no compensation, and the flush is stealing cold water from the same branch.

A basic mixing valve doesn't control temperature. It controls two openings, one on the hot side and one on the cold, and you set them so that the blend is comfortable at the pressures that exist right now. When a toilet somewhere fills, cold pressure on that branch drops. The openings haven't moved, but less cold is getting through them, so the ratio arriving at your face shifts towards hot. Nothing has got hotter, you've just lost cold.

The delay is the water already in the pipe between the valve and the shower head reaching you. Same reason it takes a few seconds to warm up when you first turn it on.

Your shower at home almost certainly has a pressure balancing cartridge, which is basically a little spool that slides when one side drops and throttles the other side to match. It's been standard in a lot of places for decades. The nicer version is a thermostatic valve, which measures actual temperature and holds it.

Before you buy anything, count the cycles at the shower with a watch. Three per minute is severe. If it turns out to be one per minute and only in the shower, I'd also look at whether the shower valve itself is restricting flow so much that the pump satisfies the tank between draws.

Check the machine before you blame the towels. Front loaders hold water in the door gasket and in the drain filter, and after five years both are usually revolting. Peel the rubber seal back and look in the fold, and empty the filter at the bottom front over a towel you don't like. If either smells, everything you wash is going to pick that up.

Two tests worth doing now rather than in six months. A bacteria test, because anything that disturbs a well is a reason to check, and an iron test that separates dissolved iron from particulate. Orange that only appears after standing is dissolved iron oxidising in the glass, orange that's there the moment it comes out of the tap is rust particles. Different fixes.

Different take, and it depends what's making you unhappy. If it's the laundry and fixtures, the iron filter is right. If it's the scale, the water heater and the feel of the water, a softener sized for iron loading will get you through a year and it's one unit doing two jobs badly rather than one job well.

If you go that route, size it with compensated hardness, meaning grains plus about four times the iron in ppm. 18 plus 12 is 30, so specify it as 30 grain water, not 18.

The thing you're paying for isn't the LED, it's the driver and the heatsinking, and in an enclosed fixture that's the whole ball game.

An LED dies because the little power supply in its base cooks. In an open fitting a cheap bulb sheds heat fine. Sealed inside a glass dome the air gets to 60 or 70C and the cheapest drivers with the cheapest capacitors give up in a year, which is exactly the pattern you've got.

What to look for is a line on the box saying suitable for enclosed or totally enclosed fixtures. Not all pricey bulbs have it and a few midrange ones do. That claim is the thing that matters, not the brand or the price.

Also pick the lowest wattage that gives you the brightness you want. Fewer watts in means less heat inside the dome, and a modern bulb making 800 lumens on 7W will outlive one making it on 11W.

There you go. Buy whatever is cheapest that carries the enclosed rating, and don't assume the £8 one has it just because it's £8.