Everything must be placed at the proper depth before the tile, stone or other surface goes on and the plumber must work closely with the tile contractor so everybody knows exactly what everybody else is doing. Reeves Journal Photo.

The master bath is where some homeowners have decided to make their stand. No matter what the cost, they are going to bathe or soak, steam or shower in own their personal Shangri La. The shower isn't just a shower; it's a statement.

            Having what you want when you want it in today's customized baths featuring "super showers" means that you have to work with a plumbing professional-and/or architect, builder, decorator,  general contractor-who's willing to put in the time to translate a magazine photo or a consumer's fantasy into a water-filled wonderland that works.

            For the plumbing pro, super showers present some interesting challenges. The fact each job is custom-"every one is different"-means that each monumental shower project has to be carefully spec'd, bid, and plumbed, said Jim Stack, owner of Stack Plumbing in Kirkland, Wash. In business in the Seattle area for 25 years, Stack does bath retrofits and remodels in addition to service and repair.

            "There are a lot of variables to these showers," Stack said. "Because each one must be carefully custom specified, it takes a bit of time to make all of the pieces fit. Some of these fixtures don't take a half hour to put in; they take an hour and a half to two hours to install. The old adage: 'I'm a plumber; I know how these things go together' just doesn't work anymore".

            These elaborate shower units require following precise, detailed instructions "or you'll mess up a very expensive fixture," he said. "Anybody that doesn't work that way is nuts. It's common sense. It's not the old 4-inch center-set lav that takes 20 minutes to put in any more."

Brian Caughlin, owner of Modern Plumbing in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., with 20 years in the business, typically works with a general contractor, builder, and as is the case increasingly often on high-end projects, an interior designer.

            "They select the plumbing fixtures," Caughlin said. "Almost all the projects we do are (individual) custom home. Generally, they understand what finished project they want and we just have to make sure that mechanically it will work. They usually get pretty good advice from wherever they buy the plumbing fixtures. They get good advice from the showrooms and then they bring it out to the job and tell us what they want."

            Custom super showers usually include a standard showerhead, a rain head, a sliding bar hand-held showerhead, and three to four body sprays, but the number of fixtures can grow exponentially, Caughlin said: "We've plumbed showers with two hand-helds on slide bars, a traditional showerhead, two rain heads, and 10 or 12 body sprays." 

            When installing such a high-end, customized project, the devil is in the details, Caughlin added. "We've gone so far as to measure the homeowners as to where on their bodies they want the body sprays to spray."

            In new addition spaces, Stack said, "We've added soaking tubs. We've added these gang showers. One project was a huge no-door, no splash, walk-in shower constructed floor to ceiling in tapered glass block. In terms of fixtures, this job was fairly restrained-just a standard showerhead with a diverter to a personal shower."

            Whether new construction or retrofit, there's nothing cookie cutter about these projects. One of the biggest factors is making sure that you have enough hot water to handle the demand from these multiple-fixture indoor water parks.

            "The rain-type shower heads are huge-some measuring two foot by two foot and often pricing out at $2,500-and it takes a lot of water for them to work properly," said Caughlin, who specializes in installing custom plumbing in high-end homes in Orange County, Calif.

            Add in multiple body sprays, traditional showerheads and hand-held fixtures, "and you go through a lot of water. So, the first thing you have to do is to make sure you have enough hot water, when all is said and done, so that the homeowner can shower when and as long as they want," Caughlin said.

            The average slow-recovery 40- or 50-gallon domestic water heater won't do the job. The system has to be upgraded to meet super-shower demand. In one project, Caughlin installed a top-of-the-line $5,000 100-gallon gas-fired Polaris water heater.

            "These heaters are basically boilers," he said. "You can literally take a 24-hour shower. As quickly as you use the hot water, more is heated to replace it," he said. Other projects have used tankless heaters. "But you're limited with the tankless heaters by gallons per minute," he said. "Usually they work fine, but I prefer the standard tank heaters."

    Stack agreed that putting in super showers often means adding a new water line to the home because you may not have enough water feeding the house for the total number of fixtures units you're adding.           "That's been a problem here, too," he said. "You not only have to look at increasing the water for increased valve size, you also have to look [whether you] have enough water feeding the home with the existing water service. We had one case on Mercer Island where they literally had to increase the meter size."  Another serious consideration is pipe size. One of the biggest challenges with an existing home is that they're not plumbed with enough water to operate everything that they want to do, Stack said.

Installing multiple mixing valves-along with high-capacity water heaters and larger diameter piping-is the correct way to ensure torrents of water from all those spray heads. Reeves Journal Photo.

"On a retrofit, the challenge is to get 3/4-inch and sometimes one-inch water lines up to that unit. If they only have half-inch, when you start adding body sprays, personal showers, and rain heads, it adds enough fixture units to it that you've got to re-pipe, at least in this area where they go by the code. They'll come in and do a fixture count, and if you're under, they won't approve it." There's a formula, so many fixtures equal so much water. "In some cases, you have to put two drains in the shower."

            You have to make sure that the volume of water coming in is high enough to satisfy the demand, "so that you can have good water pressure coming out of all of the fixtures at once. So, the way we set that up is to have multiple shower valves, not just one main valve," Caughlin said.

            In the old days, all shower valves were half-inch and all they required was half-inch water pipe. Now, one-inch isn't uncommon to try to make everything work. "We only do new construction, and usually the water main to the house is a minimum of one-inch," he said. "We have big pipes to start with and we continue that big pipe to the showers. We run a minimum of 3/4-inch to all new construction." Caughlin hasn't seen any projects with more than one master suite super shower; while several baths will be installed, the remaining ones are more standard in size and fixtures with a 3/4-inch piping run to them.

            A recent Stack project for a single woman homeowner increased the size of the bathroom "to such an extent that I have to bring 3/4-inch water lines from the other side of the house. I can get to the pipes, but to access them I have to get the heating duct people come in and pull out the cold air returns. Not only that, I have to take some heating ducts out in this older home to get to the drains to increase the drain size from 11/2- to 2-inch.

            Supplying hot water to multiple fixtures is yet another challenge. The thermostatic mixing valves-the main valves that the hot and cold water go through-determine the temperature of the water, Caughlin said. At standard pressure, you can get 20 gallons per minute through those valves. If you have multiple showerheads and body sprays that require more than 20 gpm, then you go to a second thermostatic valve.

            "We've put in as many as three or four thermostatic valves, not always because they were required, but at times because that's the way the owner wanted to do it to ensure that they've have enough hot water and pressure," Caughlin said.

            Stack also has to consider providing an ample hot water supply to these new baths. Typically, the older home being remodeled has just a 50-gallon water heater, "and that's not going to begin to cover the amount of water they're using. We've removed 50 and put in 100-gallon gas heater. We've put in 75-gallon gas heaters. Even with the tankless on-demand type heaters there are some challenges, because they will only give you X amount of water at any certain degree of rise."

            The most common solution is to have at least one valve that doesn't turn the water on and off.  That's a temperature valve, Caughlin explained. Off of that temperature valve, you might have three or four shut-off valves which operate different parts of the shower. One lever would work the rain shower head, one the standard shower head, one would work a hand-held shower on a slide bar, and another work the body sprays. "Sometimes we use two temperature valves just so that all of the water isn't running through one valve, just to add more water to the shower," Caughlin said.

            These showers take a tremendous amount of time to plumb properly, Stack said. "There are some valves coming out now where you don't have to loop them, but it used to be that you had to loop all the body sprays so that you had equal amount of (water) volume to each body spray. So, you're not only in some cases fighting water lines, but now you're fighting vents and drain lines from other fixtures that are coming down through those walls that you've got to try and run lines around."

            Another issue: Sometimes you have to install additional drains in a super-shower because a single outlet can't handle the water volume. "We use pretty fancy shower drains. Usually there's a square six-inch by six-inch drain cover in whatever finish matches the other fixtures-nickel, bronze, chrome-different than the standard round shower drains. They're very sturdy and look good," Caughlin said.

            When plumbing these shower/spas, the contractor also has to consider what's going up on the walls. We're not talking basic tiles here. Along with fairly exotic and pricey tile and trim, there is some expensive stone going into showers. The pattern or type of stone may change throughout the shower with different little details. The plumber has to make sure that none of the valves or body sprays are in the wrong place, such as on a seam of the tile or where the tile or stone changes or transitions.

            "It has to be mapped out very carefully," Caughlin said. Everything must be placed at the proper depth before the tile, stone or other surface goes on and the plumber must work closely with the tile contractor so they know exactly what they're doing. "If there's a band around the shower, the homeowner or designer doesn't want valves or body sprays interrupting the design."

            "You can't be putting something in the wall, and then have them throw tile or granite or whatever on the all and then not have it work," Stack agreed. In other words, you don't want to have to rip out a pricey tile or stonework job to fix a faulty piece of plumbing.

            Plumbing contractors have been burned because they dove into these super shower projects without the requisite knowledge of potential pitfalls, Stack asserted. "We've done enough of these jobs-and we've done it slowly enough-that we've become aware of what is needed. We've been wise enough to be very careful about bidding these things."

            Homeowners often come armed with a stack of photos from magazines or brochures with unrealistic expectations about the cost of the luxury bath of their dreams.

            Before jobs are bid, the homeowner has a figure in their mind that they expect to spend, Stack said.

            "I can tell you that you can add 50 percent to just about double that figure they have in their head," he said. "Because there's not only plumbing involved, there's framing, electricity, heating, and cooling. There's more than just increasing the size of the bathroom and making a bigger shower."