A Shower Pan Leak

Sooner or later a shower pan leak will show up as water in walls or on the floor in areas around the shower. If the shower is upstairs the water that gets away will show up in the floor below. Not good...

Shower pan leakage may be due to faulty installation, a failed pan or maybe even no pan at all. At any case something must be done because a pan is a must.

Really though tile showers really don't have pans in them. What's called a pan is really more of a pool. The tile floor in a shower really is not waterproof. It's water resistant but some water gets through some tiles and certainly gets through grout. What the pan does is catch that water and get it to the drain.

Most of the time now a PVC sheet gets put in the floor as the mortar base is built as a normal part of the shower pan installation and that liner or sheet is what stops the water and keeps it in the shower.

In the past all sorts of materials were used to catch the water including lead and galvanized sheets. In most cases those materials come apart over time and really just disappear. That often is the cause of a leak and the need for a shower pan repair. The liner is just gone or has developed a hole.

Now all sorts of stop-gap methods are proposed to cheaply accomplish a tile shower repair. Sometimes folks inject epoxy into the bed to stop the leak. Another proposed way to deal with the water is to etch the floor with acid and then coat the floor after any grout repairs are done with a masonry sealer. That will work for awhile too. These are really temporary measures though and you will have to deal with more water in time.

The only real way to deal with the leaks is shower pan removal and replacement of at least the shower floor. That means tearing out the base and coming back up with new masonry including a new liner.

This is a good time to deal with the walls too if what's behind them is sheet rock but at least you will want to replace shower pan components and really all the base of the shower.

Taking out a couple of rows of wall tiles is the usual approach and that means that there will be a difference in those tiles and also you will likely need caulking of the joint between new and old tiles on the wall.

Fixing a shower pan leak is not a simple repair but using modern methods and materials should mean you won't need to do it again, at least not in the same shower.