Leaking bath issue / does your bath have tiles under/behind the bathtub?

[toja555]

I wonder how the bath is done in your home. I have a constant leaking problem with mine. The bathroom is in a former Victorian bedroom. We had a leakage appearing on the kitchen ceiling downstairs. One month ago bath support was tightened, new sealants put, curtain shower added to avoid water splashing everywhere, bath panel refitted. Everyone?s in the house now wiping tiles around the bath after shower so that there is no water staying and damaging grout and sealants. We cleaned the mould on kitchen ceiling with bleach and it seemed nice and dry for a while, but now the mould has come back, and I am suspecting that the bath is leaking somewhere again
I asked my builder if he can retile all floor and wall including behind and under the bath tub (now it?s lino around bath and wooden chipboard under bath), so that it does not soak into floor and can be wiped easily. He said nowadays nobody does that and the bath tub has to be put first and then tiled around. I am afraid if this will be done it will not resolve the problem and sooner or later it will be just waste of money.

How your bath is done? Do you have any problems with leakage? Can it be tiled under and behind the bath in opposite to what builder says?
Thank you for any responses!

Are you sure the water is seeping through from above rather than there being a leak in the water feed/drains? Is the chipboard under the bath OK?

TBH if you have that much water going through I would be concerned about the chipboard rotting, tiled or not (if it was tiled the water would pool on the tiles until the grouting gave, and then the tiles would come off - that's if the chipboard is even good enough to tile).

The chipboard under the tap and taphole is OK, it's dry, it seems to become wet around the bath. There is one cracked wall tile, maybe it is leaking through it as sealants were just changed by a professional. I am also worried about the chipboard getting rotted. I don't trust in sealants in a long term, so getting new chipboard and tiling over seems to be the right decision for me, but the builder does not want to do this...

Our bath is placed on wooden floorboards and bare walls, with the tiling just on the outside.

The sealant stops any water leaking into the kitchen.

Mme, good for you, I wish it was that easy with our bathroom!

I would start by replacing the cracked wall tile.

It's not a case of good for me! You asked about what other people did and I told you about our bathroom. I agree with the pp - get your cracked tiles fixed. If yor bath is properly sealed along the edges, this won't be the source of your leak.

Do you have a separate shower above the bath and are the pipes to it behind the tiles or visible ? We've had 2 leaks - one was due to the overflow grill on the bath not being sealed (so any splashes or deep baths dripped through underneath), another from the radiator which ran down the pipe under the lino.

Our shower comes out of water tap which is fixed in the end of the bathtub, so all pipes are visible under the bath - no leak there. It could be the sealant again (changed to new 1.5 month ago), or oldish grout (no visible cracks but who knows...) or one cracked tile (I doubt if I can get a replacement for it). I am dreading to call to my builder and ask his verdict whether things could be fixed or everything has to be redone properly... (no money planned for that).

Sealant should work, so I don't think that tiling below the bath is going to fix it (and I agree with your builder that people don't do that as standard). I think the problem must be coming from somewhere else, or is the remains of the problem from before.

You say that you had long term leaks going from the bathroom to the kitchen below, so it will have been really pretty soggy between your floors.

What (if anything) did you do to help the floor / walls / joists dry out?

We had a leak from our bathroom to our ceiling, and our plasterers warned us that it would take a while for the water to dry out and to stop appearing through the ceiling.

GrendelsMum, we used hairdryer and natural ventilation to dry out the soggy floor. The water was never dropping to the kitchen, but mouldy patches o the ceiling reappeared repeatedly. Maybe I should use hairdryer for the ceiling bit?

Any chance of a slow leak under the floor ? We had one when a carelessly hammered nail corroded a pipe over time

Mm, does sound like a slow leak under the floor might be a possibility.

Have the same arrangement in our bathroom I think (our walls are tiled and the bath is placed against the tiles then the gap has a sealant filler) and it is slightly damp underneath it (but downstairs bathroom so no big issue).
Tiler told me off for stripping off previous tiles and said should have left them so that new tiles would have come down onto lip of bath so all water would run into bath with a strip of sealant to finish it off at the bottom.
Could you afford another layer of tiles?

We have sealant material under tiles under our bath but that's cos I asked bathroom fitters to put it there as I really hate even the idea of leaks. Before that it was just wooden floorboards underneath and the nice Polish bathroom fitters said that was normal in the UK although they would never find that in Poland or Germany.

Replace the cracked bath tile. Fill the bath with water before resealing around the edges - if the sealing was done with an empty bath, it wont allow for the weight of a person plus water pulling the bath away from the wall slightly.

take the bath panel off, leave it off, put a torch in the bathroom, look under and around the bath before, during and after every bath and shower to see the path of the water. If you never see any it will be a pipe or waste under the floor.

Chipboard is a rubbish material and crumbles away after it has been wet. When replacing it, use WBP ply, preferably painted or varnished especially on the edges.

edit

oops, my mistake, I didn't notice this zombie thread has been reactivated by a spammer with an advertising link.

out bathroom has vinyl flooring throughout, freestanding bath on top. no leaks (so far).
when we re-do the room next year we want to have it tiled throughout before putting new bath/loo in. sort of like a wet room but with 'normal' bathroom fixtures.