The Signs a Shower Is Leaking

By the time a shower leak is obvious it has usually been going for a year or more. It rarely appears as water on a floor. It appears as damage to materials that have been slowly wet, often in a different room, and knowing what to look for is the difference between a repair and a rebuild.

Look in the next room first

The clearest early signs are outside the bathroom, on the other side of a wet wall.

Skirting board that has swollen, cupped or lifted away from the wall. Paint bubbling or flaking in a band low on the wall. A carpet edge that is darker along the skirting, or floorboards that have cupped in a patch. A musty smell in a hallway cupboard or a wardrobe that backs onto the shower.

All of these mean water has been arriving in that wall for long enough to reach materials on the far side. It is the most reliable indicator there is, and it is the one people most often attribute to something else.

Inside the bathroom

Tap the tiles, particularly on the shower floor and the lower courses of the walls. A tile bonded to a sound bed sounds solid. One that sounds hollow or drummy has lost its bond, and while a single drummy tile can just be a bad fix, a broad drummy area means water has been working in the bed underneath.

Look for efflorescence: a white, chalky, crystalline deposit in the grout lines or at the base of the shower. That is mineral salt left behind by water moving through the tile bed and evaporating. It is direct evidence of water travelling where it should not be.

Check whether the floor moves underfoot near the shower, especially in a timber-floored house. Any flex means the structure below has been affected.

Look at the grout and silicone. Grout that is dark and stays dark, silicone that has lifted at the wall-to-floor junction or has mould growing under the surface rather than on it, and a shower that has already been resealed once and is going again.

The tests that tell you more

If you want to narrow it down before calling anybody, two simple observations help a great deal.

First, does the moisture appear when the shower has not been used for a few days? If it does, the water is coming from a supply line inside the wall rather than from the shower itself, and that is a plumbing repair rather than a waterproofing one.

Second, does it appear only when someone showers with the screen door closed and the water hitting a particular wall? That points at the screen seal or at falls pushing water the wrong way, which are both fixable without opening the room.

What each finding usually means

Perished silicone and a few cracked grout joints, with no drumminess and no damage next door: a surface failure, repairable properly and lastingly.

A corroded screen track or a failed screen seal: a hardware replacement, and one of the more common causes people mistake for something worse.

Efflorescence, broad drummy areas, movement in the floor, or damage in an adjoining room: the membrane is not holding, and no surface repair will reach it. That is a rebuild of the wet area rather than a reseal.

A shower already sealed once that has come back: treat this as the membrane until proven otherwise. A competent repair that fails is telling you something.

If you are seeing any of the later group, read leaking shower repairs in Cairns for what happens next, or call 0468 047 067 and describe what you are seeing and where.