Bathroom installation in London

First fix is the pipework, waste runs and anything that has to happen before walls and floors close up. It is where the job is won or lost. Waste pipes need adequate fall or the shower will drain slowly forever, and no amount of clearing fixes a pipe laid flat.

Pipe sizing matters too. Domestic hot and cold runs at 15mm and 22mm behave differently, and a shower fed off an undersized branch shared with other fixtures will drop in pressure every time somebody uses a tap. These are decisions made behind the plasterboard, and they are the reason it is worth having plumbers do the plumbing.

The single most common disappointment in a new bathroom is a shower that does not perform. That is usually a supply problem rather than a shower problem, and it is predictable before anything is bought.

A combi feeds the shower at mains pressure, which is generally good, but it is limited by flow rate and it will suffer if another outlet is running. A gravity-fed system from a loft tank gives low pressure unless a pump is fitted. An unvented cylinder gives strong balanced pressure to multiple outlets. We check what you have before recommending a shower, because a high-flow shower head on a weak supply is money wasted.

London water is hard. Thames Water states that all the water in its region is hard, with their scale putting 200 to 300 mg/l of calcium carbonate in the hard band and anything above that in very hard.

In a bathroom that means scale on shower heads, in thermostatic cartridges and on glass. It is worth knowing when choosing fittings: exposed chrome and simple serviceable cartridges cope far better over ten years than sealed units that cannot be descaled. Where a household wants to deal with it properly, a softener is a genuine option and it makes a visible difference to how a new bathroom ages.