Shower Pan Repair Ideas
Water around a shower but outside the shower may mean you are due for a shower pan repair. Several things can go wrong and cause water to get to a liner membrane. For water to get past the pan though something is really wrong with the pan.
Any water that gets through the tile or through the joints in the bottom part of a shower base gets stopped by the liner if the liner is there and doing what it should. What it should do is route water to the drain no matter how it got to the liner. Of course all this is not a factor with a tile ready shower pan.
If you do get water outside the shower from a shower pan leak, it is possible to stop in using a couple of methods depending on where it leaks and why.
In some cases the water is getting through the floor or wall at a cracked joint. The grout lines at the floor to wall intersection are liable to leak since any shifting of the floor will break the grout line. Another spot where the grout can easily break is right in the corners of the walls. At those spots cracks often start again just from a little shifting with time.
Most of the times tile installers caulk those same spots since the grout will crack there given time. Sometimes leaks there are due to both the grout and the caulk both failing.
Either way you can stop a leak due to cracks at joints by reapplying grout and then after a little curing you can caulk the joints.
Shower Pan Repair Fast
If you find the cracks and put in more grout and cracks then you can get the leaks to stop.
It will leak again though when the repairs crack and fail.
Another approach that is a little more serious is an epoxy injection.
Use this popular approach and what you do or get done is inject epoxy into the shower base and stop the leak and seal the shower from further damage.
With this method you really do not find the leak source and just put in epoxy untill the leak stops. Whether you close up the lower drain lines or do some other less than desired action is an unknown since there is little or not control on the epoxy.
Epoxy injection can work but you really do not know how the epoxy fixed the leak or how long it will stay "fixed."
As already mentioned, the shower pan will not leak if the liner is intact and in the right place.
A shower pan repair that fails to get at the real cause of the leak is less than what you really want to deal with.
The best way to stop a tile shower leak is to go in and tear out the base and start afresh. That way you remove the potential for leaks.
You can stop a shower pan leak using grout and caulk. Well actually that will stop most of the leaking by keeping a lot of water from getting to the liner. The liner still leaks. For a real shower pan repair in most cases you really must take a hammer and iron rod and break out the base and start over.