1 — The £20 Bath Panel That Cost £300

Bath panels come in three main types:

• Plastic (£20) — cheap, flexible, and very easy to crack
• Water‑resistant MDF (£40) — better, but still not waterproof
• Fully waterproof 15mm plastic, 2‑piece adjustable (£70) — solid, durable, and built to last

A customer chose the cheapest option — a thin plastic panel — because “it’s only a bath panel”. The problem? Anyone who has ever bathed a child knows exactly what happened next:

They knelt on it… and it cracked straight through.

That’s another £20 for a new panel, plus fitting time, plus the hassle. A proper waterproof panel would have survived without a mark.

Cheap isn’t always cheaper.

2 — The “Free” Shower Tray Waste That Wasn’t

Many trays come with a “free” waste. And free is great… until you stand on it and hear that horrible crack.

Plastic wastes are notorious for failing under pressure. McAlpine metal‑grated wastes, on the other hand, are built like tanks.

A customer once told us: “But the tray came with a waste — why would I need another one?”

Because if it’s free, it’s usually free for a reason.

A cracked waste means leaks, damage, and often the tray has to come out — which means tiles, walls, and flooring come out too!

3 — The Cheap Tap With the “Lifetime Warranty”

This one is a classic.

A customer bought a cheap tap online because it was “£50 cheaper than your branded one and looks the same”. (Well… similar.)

A few months later — four, if memory serves — the flexible hose burst while they were out. By the time they got home:

• The vanity unit was ruined
• Water was dripping through the kitchen light
• The bathroom door had swollen
• The hallway floor had lifted
• The architrave was soaked
• The wallpaper in the hallway was peeling

The tap’s “lifetime warranty” covered replacement of the failed part only. As a goodwill gesture, they sent a whole new tap. (They were going to weigh it in — but as it was mostly plastic, it ended up in the recycling bin!)

But would you fit it again, knowing what the last one did?

Everything else — the damage, the labour, the materials — was at the customer’s expense.

In the end, they had to make an insurance claim. The final bill was a little over £12,000.

All that from a £50 saving.

Yes, anything can fail — but branded items tend to fail far less because they’re tested, refined, and built from better materials.

4 — The Toilet Leak That Wasn’t a Toilet Leak

A customer came to us with what they thought was a simple problem: a suspected leaking toilet. Water was puddling around the back of their downstairs cloakroom toilet, and at first glance it looked like a failing pan connector.

A plumber replaced the connector, they paid the bill… and the leak came back. That’s when they called us.

Our fitter went out, dried everything, and flushed the toilet repeatedly for two hours. Not a single drop.

So we left it overnight. Next morning — another puddle, right where the pan connector enters the floor.

Pan out. 4″ bung in the soil pipe. Feed pipe capped. Everything sealed.

Our fitter nips out to get a couple of fittings, comes back… and there’s a puddle again.

At this point it’s one of those jobs where you think: “That’s not possible.”

Everything was capped. Everything was dry. Tissue test on every pipe — bone dry. Yet water was appearing from nowhere.

So we dried it again and left a camera running overnight.

Next morning, sure enough — a puddle. Reviewing the footage, you could see it slowly forming against the wall.

It was an outside wall, so we checked the obvious: outside tap? No. Gutter overflowing? No. Cracked roof tile? No.

Quick ring round and we had a thermal imaging camera on the way. (We now own two — they’re that useful.)

The thermal camera showed a cold “column” running up the wall. A couple of tiles near the ceiling came off and — soaked.

Into the loft we went. A foot of insulation, but no sign of a leak. Gutters checked. Roof checked. All good.

More investigation needed.

The room above was a carpeted bedroom. Up came the carpet and a few floorboards — and yes, it was wet.

Old heating system, old back boiler… could be a heating pipe? But that could be anywhere.

After a lot of lifting floors and feeding cameras into voids, we found the truth:

The entire house was wet from one side to the other.

The leak was eventually traced to a shower tray — over 120 feet away.

A rat or mouse had chewed through a pipe in the daughter’s bedroom. Every time she had a shower, water leaked into the void and travelled across the house until it found a gap behind the tiles in the downstairs cloakroom.

A huge amount of work went into tracing, drying, and repairing a leak that had clearly been happening for quite some time.

Not every leak is what it seems.