The opposite of ‘fixed’

Remember how I ‘fixed’ the shower a while ago? Well, it’s broken again, and in a worse way than before: no water comes out.

For a while, if you turned it off and on again, the water would come out (yes, it works for plumbing as well as computers), but then that stopped working. So I got the screwdriver out. And the Mole grips, because I found it before the adjustable spanner, and took it all apart. I even took the shower valve off the wall.

The shower valve is the main visible part of a non-electric shower, with the on–off tap and the temperature tap. I called it the shower tap until I looked on Screwfix for a new one after I broke ours even more than it had been in the first place. (To be fair, Mr Pandammonium helped me break it.)

The photo shows the mechanism of the on–off tap as it looks without its casing. There’s a nut on the right and a ridged bit on the left. The ridged bit turns when you turn the tap casing, and controls the water flow. The nut seems to hold the tap mechanism in place; it also seems to stop water gushing out.

Having taken the shower valve off the wall (Mr Pandammonium had turned the water off), it was unclear what was stopping the water coming out – it certainly went into the unit, as I found when I started to undo the nuts holding it to the wall: cold in the RHS and hot in the LHS. I thought I’d undo the nut to investigate further. It was most stiff. Mr Pandammonium did it in the end. After poking about and not finding much, I reattached everything and Mr Pandammonium turned the water back on.

I’d also taken the temperature-control tap off – ah, why not? – but couldn’t put it back on properly: the temperature-restricting button did nothing – so that’s why not.

I went in the shower after that (this whole palaver started because when I went to go in the shower, it wouldn’t come on, no matter how many times I turned it off and on again). The on–off tap didn’t quite work: I had to retrieve the screwdriver, spanner and the pliers, take the casing off and hold the nut still while using the pliers to turn the ridged bit. When I finally got some water coming out, the temperature was a smidgen too hot, but the temperature tap did nothing to mitigate that. I also noticed that water was coming out from behind the nut (shown in the photo, but it might hard to see if you don’t know what you’re looking for). When I tightened the nut, the water stopped coming out, no matter how much I turned the ridged bit with the pliers in whatever direction. Hence Screwfix.