Does different parts of the world use different standards for water pressure similar to voltages?
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?
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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?
1 bar is enought to lift water 10 meters up. The pressure gauges reads zero at atmospheric pressure.
Ahh, relative pressure
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.