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Choosing between an electric shower and a mixer shower is not really a matter of preference; it comes down to what the property's existing hot water system can actually deliver, and the two options make very different demands on it.
Serious DIY buyers and trade buyers speccing a softener for a client both need to think in terms of resin capacity matched to household size and water hardness, not just the headline price of the unit. An undersized softener will regenerate constantly and burn through salt; an oversized one is money spent on capacity that is never used.
The kilowatt rating printed on an electric shower spares supplier shower's box is the single number most buyers look at first, and it is also the most misunderstood. A higher kW rating does not mean a more powerful shower in every sense; it means the unit can heat a given flow of water through a larger temperature rise. Those two things, flow rate and temperature rise, are locked together by the electrical supply available, and pushing one up necessarily limits the other.
Plumb2U stocks immersion elements, thermostats and cylinder spares across the sizes trade buyers need to correct a capacity mismatch properly, at trade prices with next-day despatch, so the replacement part is the right one, not just the nearest one.
Cost is the other real variable. Braided hoses cost more than rubber equivalents, and for buyers working through volume on multiple jobs, that difference adds up over a year of trade supplies. The right call is matching hose type to the duty and visibility of the specific connection, rather than defaulting to one type across every job regardless of application.
For anyone new to the category, the parts worth understanding are the resin tank itself, the brine tank that holds the salt, and the control valve that manages the whole cycle, timing when regeneration happens and how much water and salt it uses. Cheaper units tend to run on a fixed timer regardless of actual usage; better-specified ones meter flow and regenerate only when the resin genuinely needs it, which uses less salt and less water over a year.