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Shower pan repair.


Phillip

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No, not in my opinion.

I have seen some attempts and they have always looked bad and still leaked. I have seen some that the owners had epoxy or something similar poured over the entire shower floor and then brushed up the sides a few inches. Looks like they have placed the entire shower floor under a plastic sheet..

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That isn't even a shower floor drain receptor; it's just a floor drain. Lacking vinyl pan liner and a proper receptor, it can't work. Can't.

Tear it all out and start over.

I'm seeing this problem on high end houses nowadays. No one knows how to install a mortar bed shower anymore.

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Laticrete make a sealer that can be troweled on, and I forget the name of the company that makes a white rubber like goop, that come in a sausage pack and can also be troweled on. I've used them both and had good luck. Both of course were on concrete. There is also a "vinyl like" sheeting that can be used in place of lead. But for my money, I prefer lead (or copper pans).

If you really want a quality job, use a technique called "pre-sloping." Pre sloping, is when you slope the concrete before installing the pan. This way, any water that seeps past the tile will drain towards the shower drain. A proper shower drain has weep holes at it's base, below the drain opening, below the tile. Any water that soaks into the base can drain out.

If you install the pan flat and then use "mud" to slope the tiles, water will stay in the pan and you will end up with problems associated with moisture.

This shower is in a hi-rise condo in Manhattan. Every time the shower ran, it leaked into the unit below.

Notice no curb.

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Now that it's open, you can see they used the wrong type of drain. In order to cover the clamp on the bottom of the drain, they leaded in a "cone." There are no weep holes, and look how deep it is until the water reaches the drain. In essence, they created created a "sink."

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This is the new base, with a curb and the correct drain. Unfortunately, in this case, the pan was not pre-sloped.

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Mudded, setting the drain height.

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Tiling

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Finished product.

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There were no less than a dozen different systems at the IBS last year, all designed to take the guess work out of sloping the pan. EPS foam wedges, modular plastic furring, custom one piece plastic pans, you name it. I think the reason we see so much crap out there is the proliferation of products designed to eliminate the "skill" from the skilled trades.

A proper mud job ain't that hard to do.

Tom

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Well I went back to the house the day to test the shower head since it was turn off. (See my other post) The water came out of the shower head just fine and I filled up the shower pan and it leaked. I was not surprised.

The pilot light was off on the furnace and they had it on. It needs replaced Friday and it still needs replaced today. Major rust, movement of the flames Crack in Chamber) and a 1978 model.

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I got lots of callbacks because of faulty shower pans when I was a builder, simply because there's a dearth of tradesmen who actually know how to install them.

The easy answer is to use an acrylic pan. They have lips that the concrete board sit on, and flanges that sort of "flash" the rear portion of the concrete board. Never had a single callback on those suckers.

And in case you're wondering, if the walls were attractively tiled, no one complained about the--usually-white pan below.

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