A shower replacement, photographed before and after in the same corner.
The photograph at the top is the after. The new valve sits on the tiles behind a round chrome plate, with a lever on the dial, and under it is a new wall outlet, a smaller round plate with a chrome elbow that the hose screws onto. The hose on it is bright chrome where the old one had gone dull.
Before
The second photograph, at the bottom of the page, is the same corner before we started. An old round valve with a lever handle, a riser rail above it with the handset in its slider, a clear handle full of beads on the handset, and the hose looped down past the valve to an outlet on a black bracket underneath.
Behind the tiles
A concealed valve is called that because almost all of it is out of sight. The body of the valve sits in the wall behind the tiles, the hot and cold supplies reach it inside the wall, and the only parts anyone sees are the plate, the control and the outlet the hose connects to. That is what makes a valve like this tidy to live with, and it is also what makes changing one a different job to changing a shower head. The question everyone asks is whether the tiles have to come off. The honest answer is sometimes. The new body has to meet the pipework where the old one did, at the right depth in the wall, and the new plate has to cover the opening the old one leaves behind, so it depends on the valve going in as much as the one coming out. When those line up, the tiles round it stay where they are, and in these two photographs they are the same tiles, with the same grout lines running past the new plate. When they do not, a few tiles come off round the valve and go back once the new body is in and tested, and the joints are sealed again before anyone uses the shower.
That last part is why it helps when the firm changing the valve also does the tiling.
Plumbing and tiling
We tile, as the bathroom page says. A valve that needs a few tiles round it is still one booking, not a plumber followed by a tiler.
The outlet
The wall outlet is the joint where the water leaves the wall for the hose. On the old shower it sat on a black bracket. The new one has its own plate on the tile, under the valve, and the hose comes off a chrome elbow.
Small parts. They are also the parts that get turned, knocked and pulled on every day.
Hard water
The water round here is hard, and our boiler page lists the places the scale settles, inside shower valves among them.
A shower that needs looking at
Ring 07546 185778 and say what the shower is doing. A valve, the whole shower or the room round it, it is the same number.
