Leak - Help

I have a tub / shower combo installed aobut 5-6 yrs ago. Just this Sunday a leak was discovered on the ceiling below.

I had a plumber come today and he charged me 100.00 just to tell me to silicone the faucet area that water got in there. Otherwise he could start cutting into walls to find the leak. He did no diagnostics. After several hours tonight of diagnostics I concluded that it is the drain that is leaking- (I think). All fixtures are dry behind them, I checked. It only leakes - which I can here dripping from the celing below- when the water is in the tub and the drain is stopped.

I am pretty sure it's the drain plug ? I removed the metal cover just for detail and i siliconed around it however after even that I put in an inch of water or so, flicked the switch for the drain and went down stairs and started to hear the slow drip. one drop every 5 seconds or so.

My questions are should i resilicone - maybe it didn't work because i only let it dry an hour. i know i know. Or should i buy the dumbell wrench and buy a new drain and remove and replace. Your help would be deeply appreciated as well as my daughters college fund since i was told today the next step would be to start cutting into walls to find the leak or 800.00 to replace the drain.

- thank you

ps - it is an Aquaglass one pice shower tub combo.

If it were my leak and my ceiling, I'd cut a hole in the ceiling (it's got to be refinished anyway, I assume) and take a peek up there, find out where the leak really is, and proceed accordingly. You could start with a small hole, just big enough to see what's going on above, but the work to repair a small hole is not much less than that to repair a big hole.

sharonfrank said:

I had a plumber come today and he charged me 100.00 just to tell me to silicone the faucet area that water got in there.

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For a hundred bucks, you'd think he would at least do the caulking himself.

If it is in the drain, you may be able to fix it without tearing up your ceiling. Use that "smart dumbell" to tighten up the top of the drain if it is loose. If that doesn't work, you'll have to gain access to the whole drain, either through an access panel or your ceiling.

Also, find a good handyman (with a lot of good references) rather than a plumber or a drywall guy. Shouldn't be more than 2-3 hundred bucks to do the whole thing including repairing any drywall. No reason to send some plumber's kid to a fancy college, while depriving your own kid of a college education. LOL

Eric

The plumbers and electricians in my area are making me made. If you ask them to come out, they ask for $150 to walk through the door. We called an electrician to double check some work I did, he said he wouldn't even look at it as it wasn't his work so he wasn't going to risk his house by giving me the ok on my amateur work. I'm a freaking amateur electrician, yea...but my stuff is done correctly and looks good. If I have ANY questions, I ask and do it right. All I wanted was a piece of mind for myself and those that have to live with my work. So then he says that he will only charge me $100 for the visit.

Next, we call a plumber in to find out why we were smelling a sewage odor. A neighbor had told me, that instead of spending 5 hours trying to find it myself, they could come out with their experience and tell me exactly what it was right away with test equipment etc. Well, $135 later...the guy leaves after say "I dunno, I don't smell anything, I think it's all in your head...maybe your neighbor has a broken pipe, maybe you need to flush your toilets...I dunno'

Thanks. Meanwhile, I'm LUCKY if I can bill myself out as a computer professional at $75 per hour. Then, the people think they own you for a year every time a **** site slaps a virus on their computer. That's why I stopped even working residential stuff.

I'm sure all these guys have horror stories, but some of the rates are insane. Especially for the quality of work being done. If they could JUST clone some of the people on here, I would pay them DOUBLE to come to MY house!

I know that as an electrician, you run into saftey issues and many time, crawling into dark dirty hot areas to do your work...and of course, plumbers deal with muck and filth all the time. So maybe they take the calls like the ones I presented to them as the wash for all the times they are knee deep in filth and hazards..I dunno. I'd love to sit down with a few of them at the bar and pick their brains for awhile under a few beers and wings.

I also charge to go out on an empty call unless it is a regular customer. If they tell me they will be a regular customer if I come out free I tell them that it works the other way around. There are a lot of "professionals" out there that shouldn't be. As far as your problem you can't fault someone for not wanting to O.K. your work in the kind of litigious society we live in. If you have done it corectly you shouldn't need to have it O.K.d by someone.