Swapping a shower over

[Anita Palley]

Hi all,

We have a ten-year-old Aqualisa Aquarian shower. It's on its last legs and I'd like to do a straightforward like-for-like replacement before it either breaks completely or gets discontinued.

According to the fitting instructions

it appears to have push-fit connections to the hidden copper pipes which feed it and project from the wall in which it's screwed. How am I going to remove the old shower without damaging the pipes?

Thanks a lot,

Dots

[Andy Burns]

From the looks of this video

could leave the push fit connectors in place and replace most of the rest around it ... provided the elbows are ok, or maybe yours has the pipes coming through the wall rather than down it, so has straight connectors?

usually push fit can be demounted, can't tell from the pictures is there any 'play' on the gray bushing parts of the connectors, if that can be pushed towards the copper pipe, you might be able to rotate/wiggle them off, if they do need replacing.

[John Rumm]

Judging by the fact it has a separate "gripper ring" plate, I would guess the push fit part just has O rings to make a seal, but no mechanism to "bite" into the pipe. It relies on being screwed to the separate gripper plat to hold it on the pipes.

So my guess would be you can simply undo the fixings and then pull it off.

[Chris B]

Having just done this on a 25 year old shower you are correct if you remove the word "simply". The parts of the copper pipe on the wet side of the "o" rings had a sort of surface crust (I hesitate to call it corrosion - but it was much like that) which made it very difficult to slide the old "o" rings over as I withdrew the shower. Having got it off and cleaned up the pipes the new one did indeed simply push into place.