Why we wouldn’t recommend shower cubicles – part 1

Yeah sure some of them last for ages, and hardly ever go wrong, but in our experience shower cubicles go wrong more often than not. There are just too many ‘weak points’ on the average shower cubicle, it doesn’t matter how expensive they are or how well they’ve been installed. Over time they will all fail – somewhere – whether it’s the rubber seal, or the corners of the cubicle or the shower waste / trap underneath the shower tray. Here’s is an example of a typical square, corner shower cubicle, along with a list of several weak points:

• The plastic shower seals on the doors – don’t age well, and the hard water in London doesn’t help either. Over time they will ALL fail, and you’ll have water leaking out of the shower and onto your bathroom floor.
• Where the glass meets the wall – this ‘join’ relies on silicone to create a seal between it and the tiles (in the case below, between it and the bare wall!)
• Where the glass meets the shower tray – again this relies on silicone to create the seal, and that means the silicone used needs to be good quality, and needs to have been applied correctly too.
• Where one piece of glass meets another piece of glass
• The shower waste / trap – often this is a compression join under the floor, which relies on a nut being tightened onto a pipe by hand. If fitted correctly they can last for ages, but at some point will fail.

Below is an example of a stock standard shower cubicle. This one we actually ripped out for a customer in Battersea, and installed a new walk-in wetroom shower area for her – that we guarantee will give her many years of trouble free use.

To read more about what we’d recommend installing INSTEAD OF a stock, standard shower cubicle, please follow this link to part 2 of this blog post