Adventures in plumbing

A few days ago, having got out of the bath, I went downstairs to make some coffee. Whilst boiling the kettle I noticed water coming down from the ceiling. The trickle became a flow, and then a torrent. (Well, not quite, but you get the idea.)

Thinking I'd just let the bath overflow and not realising it, I dried everything out. The next day, the same thing happened. And the day after that.

I'd noticed a tiny crack to the inside of the bath tub, but thought that was rather a lot of water coming out for such a tiny hole. It turned out the 'hole' was just a chip to the outer shiny layer, as I found out when I took the side panel off the bath to assess the situation.

At this point I was imagining a large insurance claim, resulting in a new bathtub, repairs to the wall tiles around where the bath is fitted, and a new kitchen ceiling. Fortunately things weren't as bad as I'd feared. I'd already discovered that using the shower instead of the bath resulted in no leaks, so I'd just assumed that the weight of the water had been causing it to seep through the bottom of the tub.

My bathtub is of the 'whirlpool' style, it has a pump with aerated water jets (so a mini hot tub). Over the last 18 years (the bath was installed in 2006 when the bathroom was completely refitted) the vibration from the pump caused the plastic nut on the pump's inlet and outlet to work loose, as made obvious by a damp patch directly under the pump:

I tightened these up and tried again. (I'd actually done this before removing the side panel, as the pump is accessable via an access panel in the side of the airing cupboard next door.) There was still a leak, but now only when letting the water out.

Ok, fine, I think I know what's wrong. (It was at this point I removed the bath panel.) As suspected, there was another wet patch underneath the drain outlet.

Before tightening everything up, I left a hot air blower running on the area for 20 minutes to dry everything out. This meant that if any further damp patches appeared, I'd be able to trace where the water was coming from. It also meant I could warm up the plastic drainage fittings and give them an extra quarter turn when tightening them up.

 I checked back an hour later and another damp patch had appeared, this time a little further back towards the wall:

Getting my hand in there, I discovered that the outside of the pipes to the taps were wet. As can be seen in the photo, the tap tails were connected to the feed pipes by way of a pair of right-angle push-fit connectors. These are fine where both parts are rigid, but this is an acrylic bath. There's always a tiny amount of flex in it. Really, the taps should have been connected via so-called flexi-tails (for non-plumbers, this has a threaded nut that screws onto the tap, a length of flexible hose, then either a push-fit or compression connector that mounts to the pipe) which will take up any movement and avoid exactly this type of problem.

As I really didn't fancy struggling with de-mounting the tap and replacing the entire tap tail with a flexi-tail, I came up with another solution. The connection to the tap itself was, in fact, perfectly watertight; the leak was coming from the right-angle fittings.

So, using a pipe cutter, I chopped both the feeder pipe and the tap tail back a little bit, and installed a flexi-coupler between the two rigid sections of pipe:

This would now take up any movement between the acrylic bath and the fixed pipework, and avoid the same thing happening again.

So, three separate leaks, all fixed. It turned out that it was only the feed to the hot tap that was leaking (the cold was fine), but just as well to replace both sets of pipework. As for the failed connector? Well...

It should be obvious from the photo that this had been leaking for some time.

Now, I still need a new kitchen ceiling, however this may have been on the cards anyway. The plasterboard is quite bowed below where the bath is installed, and there's now two big holes. But also a previous owner had done a DIY Artex job on the kitchen ceiling, which doesn't exactly look great.

Whilst I could claim this off the insurance, I've been quoted about £700 to do the ceiling (without painting it - I can do that myself and the paint will cost around £50). My insurance excess is £350. I'm sure I'd end up paying more than the difference in increased premiums if I claim. So, just going to fork out for this one I think.

Let's just hope there's no more disasters in the next few months!