A shower head dripping, and what we do when someone rings about one.
There is no drip in this photograph. It is the old shower on one of our jobs, photographed before we changed the valve and its wall outlet, so the parts this post is about can be seen. A chrome riser rail holds a handheld shower head with a clear handle full of beads, and a metal hose runs down past a round chrome mixer valve with a faceted knob to the wall outlet elbow.
After the shower
A few drips out of the head just after the shower goes off are the water left in the handset and the hose.
It runs out and stops by itself after a short while, which is the drip people mean by a shower dripping after use.
Inside the valve
A head that keeps dripping long after, or drips constantly, is a different thing.
By then the hose has emptied, so whatever still comes out of the head is water getting past the valve while it is turned off. On a mixer valve like this one, the part that opens and shuts the water is the cartridge behind the knob, with seals inside it. When those seals wear, the cartridge no longer closes all the way, and a little water keeps creeping through to the hose and out at the head. Where the water is hard, scale builds up on the cartridge and can stop it closing, and the drip it leaves is the same. So a shower head dripping when off and a shower valve dripping usually come down to the same part. The drip shows at the head, but what lets it through sits in the wall, behind the tiles and the round chrome plate, and the head is only where it ends up.
The hose and outlet
Water at the ends of the hose, or at the wall outlet while the shower runs, is another thing again.
That is the washers at those joints, not the valve.
The call
On a call about a dripping shower, we watch where the water comes out and when. If it is the valve, we change the cartridge or its working parts, or the whole valve where the parts are no longer made or the body is worn.
Changing the whole valve is the job in our concealed shower valve replacement post, the same shower after the work. Our bathroom page covers shower rooms as well as refits.
Ring 07546 185778 and say when the head drips and where the water shows, and send us a photograph of the shower if you can.
