Floor dimensions are about 3’ x 5’. 8 feet high.
What do you have in mind as a shower surround? As on this page?
Why not reveal your city or region.
Maybe a helpful doper is nearby.
Also, a picture of the shower and shower head might help. I cannot fully comprehend the problem. Did the plumber turn off the main water for whatever that repair was?
Yes. I am surprised by these prices, they cost much less in the past when I used them. Amazon has a couple of less expensive versions:
Can’t hurt – I am in the New Orleans metro area.
Here’s a pic. At upper left is a gold-colored pipe coming from the wall. The switch/knob/whatever at center is the diverter, and the gray item at lower right is part of the Water Pik hand-held shower head assembly:
Yes, the plumber did turn off the water to our house before installing the diverter.
If something like this will, indeed, stop the water flow … then this should be the answer.
How about this shut off valve. No personal experience.
There seem to be plenty of showerheads (amazon search) with on/off “pause” switches. I can’t speak to how well they work if you are more or less permanently paused between showers.
I don’t understand why your plumber installed some sort of weird diverter switch instead of an on/off valve though. Maybe I’m missing something.
This is the question. If the plumber put in a ‘diverter’ that merely cut down the flow of water, then I wouldn’t call that plumber again.
OTOH, if this does indeed shut off the water flow, then you have a temporary, but workable, solution.
Frankly, I don’t buy the failure explanation.
There’s no place for a piece that broke off the valve stem to go - it’s in the valve body. That means that it should be possible to use a forceps to remove it. Even if the valve body is gouged, there are re-seating kits.
What I would do is turn of the water to the house, pull the cold water valve stem out, and look inside the valve body to see what is really going on.
I’ve wondered this exact same thing. He installed the diverter as an afterthought the day after he initially visited our home and evaluated what I thought was just a straightforward valve stem problem.
At first, he said he couldn’t just fix or replace the broken valve stem because some part of it broke off and fell behind the wall. Then he told us he couldn’t do the tile work necessary to get to the shower assembly behind the wall. He charged us for his time all the same.
The next morning, he called and said that after he left our house, it occurred to him to install a diverter. He came back and did it without charging us for a second trip. I think (not sure) that he expected the diverter to limit flow much more than it actually did. He warned me that it would still drip and leak, but that it would hold us over until we could get a proper repair.
I guess it’s “diverting” to somewhere that’s closed off. But since it’s meant to divert water and not shut it off, it’s not really made to stop the water completely.
Poking around a little more, it might be against code to install a shut off valve at the showerhead. The main reason for this is the backpressure might damage your mixer valve. Of course if your mixer valve is broken anyway…
I had the same thoughts.
Two weeks later, I had a trusted plumber who’d done good work for us in the past to come out and look at it. Initially, I wanted to use the trusted plumber but he was backed up for weeks.
Anyway, the trusted plumber also told us that some part of the valve stem (?) fell off behind the wall somewhere. It’s entirely possible that the first plumber botched the job and broke the valve stem or something. I really don’t know.
As for looking at the valve stem to see what is really going on … I wouldn’t know what to look for. I attempted a valve stem repair once in that same shower – bought $60 worth of socket wrenches and a puller and all that – but messed up the job and had to call in a professional in the end.
Shower ‘diverter’ valves are 3 way valves. Do you have a 3-way valve, or not?
The valve shown in post 5 is a flow-control valve. The problem is that your valve does not have an ‘off’ position. You can get a different valve that does turn off, but there are two problems:
- Most other valves are bigger.
- When you tighten a valve ‘hand tight’ instead of ‘finger tight’, you are going to be leaning much harder on the shower pipe. This will stress the shower pipe, and eventually it will bend, tear and buckle.
So you still want a shower flow control valve, and you should accept that it will leak a bit, because they are designed to be only finger tight, but I think that you can get another one that shuts down to ‘almost off’ and only drips.
I think that an alternative is to get a shower hose. You can get a proper valve with a washer that shuts off entirely, and put it on the end of the shower hose. You can tighten it to entirely off. Eventually, the shower hose and/or shower head will break, because that’s what they do, but it won’t be the shower pipe that is breaking.
If it helps better paint the picture:
The cold water knob never shuts off or gets tight. It essentially spins freely (well, there’s some resistance). The plumbers both told me that the piece that fell off prevents the knob from being able to be turned like that.
That’s interesting.
Were either plumbers able to remove the knob and valve stem? If not, the solution might be to cut the dam thing off and use a screw extractor to remove it. I’d have to look at it to see how to do it.
But, it sounds like it should be fixable without destroying a huge section of wall.
(Of course, it’s easy to say that from over here…)
Can you post a photo of the cold water valve?
Yes, both plumbers removed the knob and valve stem with no issue.
I will post a photo of the cold water valve, but it looks unremarkable to me. Unless you mean a picture of the valve once removed from the wall, so you can see the stem and washers and all that?
Closeup of the cold water valve:
This pic is generally of the section of tile I’m told must be removed to permanently fix the shower:
These two pics give a floor-to-ceiling view. The shower head is resting in a gallon bucket as a noise-control measure.
… have a look at the photos I just posted. Maybe I can put a shut-off valve at the base of the Water Pik shower head? Have to go look.
BTW, regarding “3-way valve” versus “flow control valve” … the plumber that installed it called the piece a “diverter”. I really can’t vouch for the accuracy of the terminology.
I wonder if part of the valve body broke - that would require replacing it.
“Almost off and only drips” would be acceptable.
The shower hose idea sounds good, too. The Water Pik head that we have, unfortunately, doesn’t allow the head to be removed from the hose. So we’d have to buy a whole new showering assembly (hose + head + shut-off valve). That’s do-able.