Shower Piping Dilemma

In general yes - you won't be taking that much of a cut out of the wall.

If you are going to plaster over the pipes then it is often easier to do them in plastic and not copper. (if you do use copper make sure you wrap it in denso tape or similar to protect the pipe from corrosion).

try to use swept curves (using spring or pipe-bender) rather than elbows where possible to improve flow ...

Thanks for the advice.

I was planning to fit a thermostatic shower bar, with one of those "bar plates" that secures to the wall. Any suggestions on how I could make the right angle joints in an efficient manner to avoid digging out the wall too deep as the "bar plate" has compression fittings at the rear?

Andy

Yes, this is how I did it last time: http://82.24.138.95/~john/shower_valve_in_solid_wall/

Very nice. How much do you charge? :)

John,

Thanks for that, great pictures, I do like that way that you have been able to produce a 90 deg bend without having to go too deep into the wall. I think I will also try to get the BSP fittings instead of using a wall plate.

Cheers!

Andy

I did something similar using these:

If you have to ask you can't afford it 8^)

chases is a better option than copper, although a matter of getting the right plastic fittings.

Except for the trivial detail-ettes that I used fittings which were BSP male rather than female, and 22mm rather than 15mm, you are absolutely correct!

Why? It's just a former, which is removed after plastering in the pipework.

I deliberately used copper to provide rigidity to the shower mixer valve, and soldered joints since they wouldn't be accessible once installed.

I forgot to mention on the wibble (though I've updated it now) that you should test the pipework (under mains pressure or better) _before_ installing it!

shower with WBP ply walls and PVA-ed them up until you could have stuck yourself to it (like the old Solvite ads - ?) then tiled straight onto the board. It strikes me that yor method gives you thin sheets of expamet-reinforced cement - held to the board by staples - bearing the tiles, rather than the ply bearing the tiles' weight directly. It also looks like harder work :-)

PS: however I like your HTML better than mine (or at least: that produced by my Mozilla Composer). What did you do yours with?

The main intention was to achieve three things: firstly having the tray installed first and then the render and tiles overlapping the top means that any run off from the tiles drains well into the tray and away from the edge. Hopefully this will limit the escape of water should the seal round the base ever fail. Secondly it means there is a waterproof layer behind the tiles so again should any water get through the grout etc then again it has nowhere to go. Lastly it was a way of getting a very rigid wall of slender thickness (the cupboard behind the shower was not orignally on the plans but it seemed like a useful thing to include since there was space and it also means future access to pipework etc was simpler).

I could have achieved much the same result with a couple of sheets of aquapanel over the ply I guess, but I had the spare metal lath and render is cheap!

That is pretty much what I did for the rest of the room - although onto plasterboard rather than ply.

Yup, that is true of most render onto a non adhesive surface I guess. Although a good proportion of the weight is also sat on the shower tray I expect, so you have in effect an independant structure in the render and tiles (the tile adhesive was a 3mm thick full bed as well).

The result (so far at least) all seems rock solid.

Slightly - although not that much in reality. Took about 20 mins to fix the xpermet with an air stapler (firing at a slight downward angle so as to have the wire "hung" as well as fixed by the staples). Plus a couple of hours to render it. Total cost of materials perhaps 25 quid (excluding tiles obviously).

Dreamweaver...

Can't remember if the original site was created in 4.0 or MX though.