Leaking Shower Repairs

A leaking shower almost never announces itself in the shower. It shows up somewhere else: a skirting board swelling in the hallway, a dark line along the bottom of a wall in the next room, a floor that has gone spongy near the door, paint bubbling on the opposite side of a wet wall, or a smell that never quite clears no matter how long the fan runs.

By the time any of those are visible, water has been moving for a while.

Finding out where it is going

The first job is establishing which of several quite different faults you have, because they have different fixes and wildly different costs.

Water can escape through failed grout or perished silicone, which is a surface problem. It can pass the screen, either at a hard seal or because the floor falls the wrong way and pushes water at the door. It can come from a tap or mixer body inside the wall, which looks exactly like a shower leak from the outside and is a plumbing repair. Or it can be going through the tiles into a membrane that is no longer holding, which is the expensive one.

Those are told apart by where the moisture appears, whether it appears when the shower is not being used, whether the tiles sound hollow, and whether the floor moves. It is worth doing that properly before anybody quotes, because three of those four faults are genuinely repairable and the fourth is not.

What a repair covers

Where the failure is at the surface, the work is straightforward and lasts. The old grout is cut out rather than skimmed over, the joints are cleaned back to a sound depth and regrouted, the internal corners and the floor-to-wall junction are stripped of old silicone and resealed in a flexible sealant, and the screen seals and sweeps are replaced. Where the waste flange or the screen track has been bedded badly, that gets remade.

Done properly this is a real repair, not a cosmetic one, and on a shower whose membrane is intact it will hold for years.

When we will tell you not to bother

This is the part of the trade with the worst reputation, and reasonably so. A regrout sold on a shower with a failed membrane will look excellent for a few months and then leak again, and the homeowner will have paid twice.

The signals that a repair will not hold are consistent: broad areas of drummy tiling rather than isolated spots, movement in the shower floor, efflorescence or white mineral crusting where water is passing through the tile bed, damage in an adjoining room, and above all a shower that has already been sealed once and has come back.

When those are present you will be told the room needs the wet area rebuilt rather than resealed, and pointed at shower replacement instead. We would rather lose the smaller job than sell it twice.

Why these fail sooner here

Silicone, grout and screen hardware all have a service life, and a bathroom in Cairns runs them down faster than the same bathroom would further south. The room rarely gets a chance to dry fully between uses, which keeps the joints working and shortens everything.

Call 0468 047 067 and describe what you are seeing and where, or send a photo of the affected area through the form.