simont | Scattered showers

A few weeks ago my shower developed an annoying leak. Every time I got out of the shower, I'd see a big puddle of water on the bathroom floor in spite of the shower curtain supposedly being in the way.

This is the first serious homeowning problem which I've been able to solve without calling in a professional. However, none of the process was fun, not even the end of it. The stages I went through were as follows:

Denial

This went through the sub-stages of ‘I must just have not been careful enough with the shower curtain’ (not supported by the evidence), ‘perhaps it was a one-off oddity’ (not borne out by subsequent events) and the desperately hopeful ‘perhaps I'm imagining it’ (uh-uh).

Frustration

Having decided there really was a problem and I really had to do something about it, I began systematic investigation. (I hadn't ruled out calling in a plumber at this point, but I wanted to do some diagnosis myself first so I'd know if I needed one and so I'd have something to tell one if I did.)

This was a very annoying phase, because the leak turned out to be a heisenbug: whenever I actually got bodily into the shower with the intention of getting clean, it leaked, but whenever I ran the shower with the intention of testing it to debug the leak, it didn't.

I eventually resorted to dusting cornflour over various surfaces in order to see whether it got washed away by rivulets of water; even that didn't actually reveal the problem, but it did permit me to rule out all the places I'd dusted cornflour and eventually isolate the problem to some non-watertight sealant. (Water had only been running down on to that sealant as a result of bouncing off my body, and not when the shower was unoccupied – hence the heisenbug. Once I'd realised that, I was able to reproduce the leak reliably in testing by pointing the shower head directly at the culprit.)

Incompetence

Having tracked down the problem and determined that it didn't involve anything (a) complicated, (b) unfixable without specialist plumbing tools or (c) buried behind the wall panels or under the bath, it now seemed a simple matter to fix it. So I went to B&Q and bought a bottle of bathroom sealant; then I came home, scraped away as much of the defunct sealant as I could get off with a Stanley knife, and got to work.

First lesson: read the instructions carefully before leaving the shop, and certainly before starting to actually do anything. I got the bottle home and looked at the back. ‘Step 1: cut off the nozzle in the following way.’ Fine, did that. ‘Step 2: load the cartridge into your sealant gun.’ … Ah.

Well, I thought, how important can a sealant gun be? There's goo in the bottle, which I want to be on the bath instead, and the bottle's got a nozzle. I can just squeeze it, right?

… wrong. It turns out that the bottom of the bottle is detachable and intended to be gradually pushed upwards by the sealant gun mechanism to squeeze the goo out of the nozzle at the top. So when I squeezed the bottle in the middle, I got a small amount of goo out of the nozzle and then the bottom came off the bottle messily. (But not too messily; sealant is sticky and viscous stuff and didn't actually go everywhere.)

So I tidied that up, and then tried pushing the bottom of the bottle upwards manually with my thumbs, which worked for a few inches until my thumbs started to hurt too much. Found a piece of wood to use instead, and that sufficed to apply the rest of the sealant – leaving only the problem that the resulting seal was wobbly, too thick, and downright looks as if it was applied by somebody pushing a piece of wood into a bottle against great resistance and with his hands shaking from the exertion. Still, it looked as if it ought to be watertight at least, which is surely the most important thing.

Embarrassment

That evening, I went to the pub and recounted some of this to what I hoped would be a sympathetic group of friends. A couple of people looked at me in absolute astonishment at the idea that I could possibly not have known sealant was applied using a sealant gun. ‘Well, surely you must have seen someone doing it before?’ I was asked. ‘Your parents, for example?’

Well, no, actually; bathrooms don't need sealing very often, and although it's probable that my dad did do it once or twice while I was around, I either didn't know he was doing it at the time or wasn't particularly interested in watching him do it when I could have been (for example) playing computer games. This didn't strike me as remotely unreasonable, and still doesn't.

They also told me there were special sealant-remover products which I could and should have used in place of my Stanley knife. Ho hum.

Suspense

The back of the sealant bottle also said that it would take days to dry, and should be ventilated in the process. So I left it well alone for days on end, keeping the bathroom window open as much as possible when I was in, and going in to work early to use the shower there when necessary.

Anticlimax

This morning I took my first actual shower-with-intent-to-wash in the repaired bathroom. It was a very pleasant shower, made all the more so by having gone without one for a couple of weeks. When I got out of the shower, I checked the area where the leak puddle had previously collected, hoping this time that it would be bone dry.

It wasn't. There was just a tiny wet patch, as of about ten drops of water having dribbled out where there had previously been a river.

I think I'm going to have to call that an acceptable imperfection, not least because tracking down ten drops would be a hell of a job compared to tracking down an entire impossible-to-miss deluge. But it's just imperfect enough to spoil what would otherwise have been the warm satisfied glow of a problem thoroughly (if not actually competently) solved.

Bah.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I did almost exactly the same thing with sealant on a leaky sink in my previous flat: bought a tube, discovered it was supposed to be applied from inside a gun thingy, thought bugger it, burst the tube, and applied it manually (though in my case I think by using my fingers on the goo from the bottom burst tube), and ended up with a messy but more or less functional job.

heee, I didn't used to know about sealant guns either - we have 2 now though... Did you smooth the sealant over after (a bit of potato works better than a wet finger, but if you over smooth it it gets weak around the edges again, though it looks smart...) also we learnt the hard way when sealing a bath fill it with water so it sags, and leave it in till it's dry (else it pulls the sealant away when you fill it even though it seems fine empty)... also the sealant remover is strife and overrated... I'd go for stanley knife first, Then maybe sealant remover to tidy up, but it was slow and gunky and not overwhelmingly impressive...

I'm sure DIY's more fun when you're figuring it out for yourself!! :)

Yeah, my dad told me about filling (or half-filling) the bath when I talked to him on the phone about it. After it was too late, naturally; if I'd thought to ring him beforehand it'd probably all have gone much more smoothly...

I did smooth the sealant afterwards, using a bit of paper with my finger behind it. It still didn't end up very neat, but it was better than nothing...

Glad to hear I didn't miss much with the sealant remover, though :-)

also we learnt the hard way when sealing a bath fill it with water so it sags, and leave it in till it's dry (else it pulls the sealant away when you fill it even though it seems fine empty)

Gosh! I never knew that. That explains why my carefully-applied sealant has cracks in it already after only a couple of months. :-} Thank you!

Yes, that's what plumbers do. I think that the person who (probably DIYically) sealed our bath didn't do that, because the sealant doesn't meet the wall properly in some places. The next time there is a FilkCon and the house is mostly empty I will do something about it.

Our landlord got some professionals in who still didn't know about the half-filling the bath thing ;)

A couple of people looked at me in absolute astonishment at the idea that I could possibly not have known sealant was applied using a sealant gun.

You can buy sealant in a squeezy-tube rather than an inna-gun tube. I did the sealant round our bath, the sticking-on of tiles, and the grouting between said tiles, all done 'by hand' with squeezy-tubes. It's like piping icing on a cake!

What did you do with the weird secret cavity behind the tiles in the end?

Fortunately, I have a suitable gun, but I had to get it through an altogether different incompetence.

Many years ago, the little insert on the top of my gear stick with the diagram of which gears are where was rattling. I furtled the RS catalogue and found a polyurethane-cyanacrylate flexible space-filling adhesive. I figured a bead of that around the edge would solve the problem nicely. I ordered it.

Unfortunately, in an error of G'Gugvuntt-Vl'hurgian proportions what arrived was a large cylinder intended for a glue gun rather than a tiny tube of the stuff. It was only £3 — how was I to know one could get such a huge quantity so cheaply?

I bought a gun and ended up filling the entire cavity behind the insert rather than beading around the edge. It was several years before I needed the gun again, by which time the remaining goop had set solid, forming an entertainingly sproingy model of the inside of the nozzle.

Geek solution to your remaining problem: stash under the leak all those silica gel sachets you're bound to have lying around.

I used silca gel packets to see how long it'd take them to saturate from the annoying but inevitably condensation in my car.

The answer is "less than one night, during which they will split and spread little semitransparent spheres everywhere". I don't think the little paper sachets are designed to cope with the volume that fully-saturated pellets expand to.

Maybe you want a poll or, to ask people. I certainly never saw sealant being applied, though remember the "fill with water" suggestion. Although I'd known sufficiently little I would have known I need to ask around first. I don't have a good sense of what can be fixed and what needs a professional. However, I'm always very chuffed[1] whenever anything like this works.

[1] typo: cuffed

Haha yes, I had a similar sealant experience in Bristol. Although I clearly didn't squeeze the thing hard enough for it to fall apart before I went and got a gun. (Which I remember being a right bugger to use neatly, if that's any comfort.)

Scattered showers

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