What Is a Waterstop Angle, and Why Does Your Shower Need One?
It’s a small angle at the shower entry. Most homeowners have never heard of it. Leave it out and the shower leaks into the room next door.
What it does
Water doesn’t only sit on top of your tiles. Some gets through the grout into the screed bed underneath – which is exactly what the membrane below is there for.
But that water has to go somewhere. Without a barrier at the shower entry it travels sideways, out of the shower, under the bathroom floor, and keeps going – past the doorway, into the hallway, into the room on the other side of the wall.
A waterstop angle is set into the substrate at the shower opening to block that path. The membrane is dressed over it, so water in the bed stays inside the shower area and drains back to the waste.
Why yours might not have one
It’s cheap to buy and quick to fit, so cost isn’t the reason. It gets left out because it’s an extra step, it’s invisible once tiled, and nobody looking at a finished bathroom can tell whether it’s there.
That’s the problem with waterproofing generally. Every corner cut is buried under tiles by the time anyone could check.
The giveaway
A missing waterstop usually shows up as damp outside the bathroom while the bathroom itself looks perfect. Swollen skirting in the hallway. A dark patch on the bedroom wall backing onto the shower. Floorboards lifting just past the doorway.
People often rule out the shower because it looks fine. It usually does.
Ask to see it
If you’re renovating or building, ask whoever waterproofs your bathroom whether a waterstop is going in at the shower entry – and ask to see it before the tiler starts.
Thirty seconds to look at, and it’s the last chance you get. Once the tiles are down the only way to check is to take them up.
Anyone doing it properly won’t mind being asked.
Need someone to look at it?
We inspect before we quote, across Sydney. Call 0450 679 512 or email sam@sydneychoicewaterproofing.com.au.
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