Shower pan leak
A second floor shower pan drain seal leaked. It did quite a bit of damage to the first floor ceiling. The “no caulking required” seal was only a few years old. Either the manufacturer changed the size or the first one shrunk.
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Or is it the shower pan to clamping ring seal that is leaking?
Plug the drain and flood the shower to the curb threshold. If it leaks it may be the pan installation.
After you replace the seal :)
Bob "hot rod" Rohr
trainer for Caleffi NA
Living the hydronic dream0 -
it didn't shrink so much as it was forced in to that smaller diameter between the drain pipe and drain and hardened that way as it aged. it could have shrunk after the pipe was no longer in the middle of it but i suspect it was compressed that way in use and just fossilized like that.
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The seal came with the shower base. The pan and seal were the same brand. I don’t know why it shrank. It did last longer than the 1 year warranty. I’m not using that brand seal again I’ll try something different and put a bead of silicone around the pipe first.
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I always installed them with Marine-Grade Silicone on all sides and neatly wiped off excess. Added leak prevention. Mad Dog
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The leak happened a few months ago. I thought it was interesting that a seal that came with the pan actually didn’t. I replaced it with a toilet tank to toilet gasket. It’s not leaking as observed from the hole in the ceiling underneath. I wanted to make sure before ceiling was repaired.
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Hi, If it isn't too, too ugly, I'd put an access hatch in that ceiling. That way, the shower will never leak again. 😉
Yours, Larry
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there are access panels that are designed to install in a hole you cut in the celling after the ceiling is installed, they have a flange that covers the edge of the hole instead of being mudded in. unless this is in like your living room or dining room or a bedroom where you'd rather not think about there being a hole there.
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I have used a cold air grill to cover the uglies. The wall face type not the baseboard.
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I need to replace a 3’x4’ piece of if sheetrock in the first floor kitchen and repaint. The house is 70 years old and has be remodeled a few times. Card board and a staple gun works for now.
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Is it a moulded one piece shower base? Or a tile floor with a pan liner below.
Looks like a creative homemade P trap?
Bob "hot rod" Rohr
trainer for Caleffi NA
Living the hydronic dream0 -
looks like it does not meet code. makes one wonder what is happening at the shower pan.
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It’s a moulded plastic shower base which replaced a 60 year old tile shower floor during a bathroom remodel. The seal obviously shrank and no longer sealed as can be seen by the first side by side photo. That seal came with the base same brand as the base.
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normally it would be compressed between the drain and pipe and clamped in place in some way to keep the synthetic rubber compressed between the 2 usually either with a plate and some screws or a compression ring that screws in to the drain
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The rubber seal is friction fit between drainpipe and pan as in the image
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that is terrible design. not only is there nothing to compress the gasket, the drain is on the outside of the pipe instead of the inside so even the slightest amount of leakage is dripping down to the floor below rather than in to the pipe.
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It is a terrible design especially when the seal shrinks. The
type of seal in the image with RTV silicone is a tight fit and has not leaked in a few months. I’m having some rooms painted in a few weeks and it will be repaired.
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I've had pretty good luck with the gaskets that come with the shower drains. They typically come with a threaded compression ring that you tighten down with a key.
8.33 lbs./gal. x 60 min./hr. x 20°ΔT = 10,000 BTU's/hour
Two btu per sq ft for degree difference for a slab
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I have also. If leak is minor enough it may evaporate.
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»that is terrible design. not only is there nothing to compress the
gasket, the drain is on the outside of the pipe instead of the inside so
even the slightest amount of leakage is dripping down to the floor
below rather than in to the pipe.«Yes indeed. There are deck drain systems that feed into a funnel so that any water getting past the primary strainer still end up in drain pipe.
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Bad design aside. I sent a photo of the leaking seal to the manufacturer of the shower base and seal. The seal on the left is smaller than the replacement I bought. The part number is the same. It can be see by zooming in. I don’t know if the original on the left shrunk or they made it larger in size. I
got no response. I have $700 damage from the leak. My insurance is $1,000 deductible.
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With that homemade trap, maybe the pipe going through the pan is not perfectly plumb? So the gasket is not sealing as designed.
Bob "hot rod" Rohr
trainer for Caleffi NA
Living the hydronic dream3 -
without a lockring to compress the gasket in place as the pipe and the shower pan expand and contract and move it is likely to slowly push the gasket out as they move around.
i wonder if you could cut out the molded in drain and clamp on a drain of a better design, of course you also have clearance issues in the ceiling.
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The home made trap is because the drain was exactly over the 3” wide joist and the tile guy was coming in the morning. The 2” pvc is level and the toilet tank gasket is working great. It’s a tighter more secure fit than the one supplied with the base.
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that’s a install issue not a design issue.
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it doesn't seem that there is anything of substance to retain the seal in place and both the pan and the pipe are going to change size a lot with temp, that part does seem to be a design issue.
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I didn’t get an answer from E.L Mustee as to why or if they changed the size of the gasket. If the gasket was made larger then it may have worked better but I didn’t want to chance it
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Seems to me it is like a doughnut you use in a CI hub when replacing CI with PVC or ABS. The drain pipe expands the gasket.
@skyline137 did you measure the gaskets to see if there is any difference?
The old one does look smaller.
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but using a doughnut instead of caulking hub and spigot cast iron the pipe slips inside the hub and doesn't have someone walking on it and in a lot of cases has gravity in its favor.
for this it would be like if you extended a piece of 4" ci by slipping a piece of 6" ci over the top of it from above and jammed a doughnut in from the bottom.
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That gasket needs something on the outside to hold it in place as well as the pipe inside!
Installation Error!
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i think it is a design error because el mustee/owens corning makes fixtures, not fittings.
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Those Muster and Swan brand shower bases have been around for years with those gaskets they generally work just fine
Aggressive water could break down certain rubber blends causing them to get brittle
There may be a tolerance difference between the ABS/ PVC and the CI versions
Have you seen how freestanding tub drains assemble? You set the brass tub tailpiece down into an o ring, which you may not even see from below. A dab of silicone grease to help it slide in place
If the shower bases flexes at all, that could be a problem. I like to spray foam under them for support and noise suppression
Weight them down first😲
Bob "hot rod" Rohr
trainer for Caleffi NA
Living the hydronic dream0 -
2 tight fitting sleeves that fit inside each other with an o-ring in a groove on one of them would be 1000x more secure than that doughnut jammed in between the pipe and the shower pan. everything on a car has worked like that for about the past 40 years.
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WOW! 1000X, got some data to back that up?
At days end the correct, product and correct installation the factory supplied "donut" should be adequate. It's not a pressure seal as a tub full of water presents, even at flood rim.
I would trust it more that a foam or rubber toilet tank gasket.
Top of the pipe cut straight? Donut tapped down as shown? Bedding under the pan as shown?
Bob "hot rod" Rohr
trainer for Caleffi NA
Living the hydronic dream0 -
even if the pan is bedded especially pvc pipe is going to expand and contract a lot. i wouldn't trust any of those things without the ring to compress it that @Alan (California Radiant) Forbes showed
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it is also possible that for any number of reasons those weren't made out of the compound that was specified
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A lot of people have had problems with this type of installation. That seal is the most likely place to leak. Bad installation is definitely a problem with that gasket. In my case I think the size of the original gasket was the cause of the leak. I would have noticed the leak sooner if there wasn’t a second sheet rock ceiling covering the original ceiling in the converted garage. Water pooled and came down all at once. I used a different seal (toilet bowl to tank gasket) it definitely works better it
hasn’t leaked in a few months use. I feel confident enough to get the ceiling repaired now.
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there are 3 different gaskets, maybe it shopped with the wrong size for PVC?
Any part number on it?
Bob "hot rod" Rohr
trainer for Caleffi NA
Living the hydronic dream0 -
The reason for the original post was about the part number on two supposed identical gaskets. The gasket on the left leaked. I don’t know if it shrank or came that way but it’s definitely not the same size as the one on the right.
If you ZOOM in the part number is the same.
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does the new gasket just slip in or does it get smaller when you slide it in there? as most synthetic rubbers age they harden and will take the shape they were confined to
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