Is your shower leaking?
Wet-area leaks are the most common serious defect in NSW homes, and they are quiet. By the time water appears where you can see it, the framing has usually been wet for a year or more. Here is what to look for, how to test it yourself, and how to tell a $700 problem from a $7,000 one.
The signs are in the next room, not the bathroom.
This is the single most useful thing on this page, so we will put it first. When people go looking for a shower leak, they look at the shower. That is exactly the wrong place, and it is why these things run undetected for years. A shower is designed to be wet. It is wet every day, it is meant to be wet, and water inside it tells you nothing at all. The membrane's job is to keep that water in the room. So the evidence that the membrane has stopped doing its job is, necessarily, water where the room ends.
Go and stand on the other side of the shower wall, in the bedroom, the robe or the hallway cupboard that backs onto it. That is your diagnostic zone. Look at the bottom 100mm of the wall, the skirting, and the floor covering right against it, because water runs downhill and it collects at the bottom plate. What you are looking for:
- Paint lifting, bubbling or discolouring near the skirting on the shared wall. Usually the first visible sign anywhere in the house.
- A skirting board that has swelled, cupped or gone soft. Press it with a thumbnail. Sound timber resists; wet timber gives.
- Carpet that feels cool or damp along the shared wall, or underlay that has gone dark. Peel a corner back in the wardrobe where nobody will notice.
- A musty, earthy smell in a robe or linen cupboard on the far side. Your nose finds this before your eyes do, and it is a genuinely reliable indicator.
- Floorboards cupping or a vinyl edge lifting along that wall in the older homes around Turvey Park, Kooringal and Mount Austin.
Inside the bathroom: what actually means something.
There are signals in the room itself, but you have to know which ones matter. Most do not.
Drummy tiles are the big one. Take a knuckle or the handle of a screwdriver and tap your way across the shower floor and the bottom 300mm of the walls, listening. A properly bonded tile gives a solid, dull tap. A drummy tile sounds hollow and echoey, and once you have heard both you cannot unhear the difference. Drummy means the tile has lost its bond and there is a void behind it. On a shower base, that usually means water has been sitting in the bed under the tiles, which means the membrane below is either failed or was never continuous in the first place. Drummy tiles on a shower floor are close to a verdict on their own, and it is rarely a good one.
A floor that gives underfoot. Stand in the shower and shift your weight around, especially near the waste and in the corners. Any flex, any sponginess, means the substrate under the tiles has been wet long enough to soften, and that is a structural conversation rather than a tiling one.
Efflorescence. A white, chalky, crystalline bloom in the grout lines, most often at the base of a shower wall. That is salts being carried out of the bed by water moving through it and depositing as the water evaporates. It is not cosmetic. It is direct evidence that water is travelling somewhere it should not be, and it is one of the more definitive things we look for.
Grout that stays darker in one patch long after the rest of the room has dried. That patch is holding moisture, which means it is connected to something behind it that is also holding moisture.
Silicone pulled away from an internal corner. A gap you can slide a fingernail into is an open door straight to the membrane at the exact junction where failures start. Our tile and regrout repairs page covers putting this right.
What mouldy grout does and does not mean.
Here is the distinction that saves people the most money, and almost nobody gets told it. Grout is not waterproof. It never was, it was never designed to be, and it is not supposed to be. Grout is a filler between tiles. The waterproof membrane behind the tiles is the thing keeping water in your bathroom, and it works perfectly well with grout that looks awful.
Which means mouldy grout, by itself, is not a leak. It usually means the room is not drying out properly between uses, which is a ventilation problem, and it is extremely common in Wagga bathrooms through our cold winters when nobody wants to open a window and the exhaust fan runs for thirty seconds. Fix the drying, clean the grout, and the room is fine.
What makes grout serious is when it is cracked or missing rather than merely grubby. A crack is a path. It lets water reach the membrane directly and in volume, asking the membrane to do far more work than it was designed for and accelerating its wear. And it hands an insurer a clean lack-of-maintenance argument if the membrane later fails, which is covered in detail on our page about shower leaks and insurance. So: mould is a housekeeping issue, cracks are a countdown.
The Wagga factors that bring it on faster.
Two local things matter here. The first is our winter. Wagga gets properly cold, with 30 to 40 frost nights a year, and a cold bathroom with the window shut and a token run of the exhaust fan simply does not dry out between showers. A wet area that never fully dries is a wet area whose grout, silicone and membrane are all working a longer shift than they were designed for, and the mould that everyone treats as a cleaning nuisance is really telling you about the ventilation.
The second is movement. Our temperature range is enormous, and in the newer estates around Estella, Boorooma, Lloyd and Bourkelands the reactive clay under the slab swells and shrinks across the seasons on top of that. Movement cracks grout and splits silicone, and cracked grout is the path. It is why a bathroom in a Wagga home genuinely does need its silicone looked at more often than the same bathroom would in a milder climate, and why our maintenance guide puts the corners on a five to eight year cycle rather than treating them as permanent.
Repair or retile? The honest test.
This is what everyone actually wants to know, and there is a reasonably clean rule.
It is probably a repair if the tiles are all solid when you tap them, the floor is firm underfoot, there is no efflorescence, nothing is showing on the far side of the wall, and the problem is visibly the silicone or a cracked tile or grubby grout. A regrout, full re-silicone and tile replacement at $600 to $1,200 fixes that genuinely, not cosmetically, and buys years.
It is probably a retile if any of the following are true: drummy tiles on the shower base, a floor that moves underfoot, efflorescence in the grout, damp or staining on the other side of the wall, or a bathroom old enough that the membrane predates any serious standard. There is no surface repair for a failed membrane, because you cannot reach the membrane without removing everything on top of it. If someone offers to fix your leak by painting a sealer over the tiles, they are selling you a delay and you are the one who pays for it later. Our bathroom tiling page covers what a proper rebuild involves, and the cost guide has both sets of numbers.
A worked example from Ashmont.
An owner in Ashmont, one of the older suburbs inside the Wagga Wagga City Council area, called because of a smell in the linen cupboard. Nothing visible anywhere, no damp patch, no marks, just a musty smell that they had noticed on and off for about a year and assumed was the towels. The cupboard backed onto the main bathroom shower. Tapping the shower base found four drummy tiles in the corner nearest that wall, and there was light efflorescence in two grout lines at the base of the wall. Skirting in the cupboard gave slightly under a thumbnail.
That is a failed membrane, and it had been failed for a while. The full strip found the bottom plate wet and one stud with early rot, both replaced by a carpenter, then a new licensed AS 3740 membrane and a full retile. $9,100 all up. Had they acted on the smell when they first noticed it, the framing would probably have been dry and the job would have been about $7,400. Twelve months of assuming it was the towels cost $1,700, and they were fortunate it was not far worse. Which is really the point of this whole page: this is the one household problem where the month you notice it is the cheapest month it will ever be. Every dollar figure above is a 2026 Wagga rate, consistent with our 2026 pricing guide, so you can hold them against a quote you get today.
Common questions about leaking showers in Wagga.
What are the first signs a shower is leaking?
The earliest signs are almost never inside the shower, which is why they get missed for years. Look on the other side of the shower wall first: lifting or discoloured paint near the skirting, a skirting board that has swelled or gone soft, carpet that feels cool or damp along that wall, or a musty smell in a robe or hallway cupboard that backs onto the bathroom. Inside the room, watch for grout that is permanently darker in one patch, silicone that has pulled away from a corner, efflorescence which is a white chalky bloom in the grout lines, and a floor tile that gives slightly underfoot.
What does a drummy tile mean and how do I check for one?
Drummy means the tile has lost its bond to the substrate and there is now a void behind it. You check by tapping across the tiles with a knuckle or the handle of a screwdriver and listening: a bonded tile gives a solid dull tap, a drummy one sounds hollow and echoey, and the change is obvious once you have heard both. On a shower floor, drumminess is a serious signal because it often means water has been sitting in the bed under the tiles, which means the membrane below is either failed or was never continuous. Drummy tiles on a shower base almost always mean the room is at end of life rather than needing a patch.
Is a mouldy or cracked grout line a leak?
Not by itself, and this is the most useful distinction in the whole subject. Grout is not waterproof and was never meant to be, it is a filler, and the membrane behind the tiles is what keeps the water in the room. So mouldy grout on its own usually means the room is not drying properly, which is a ventilation and maintenance issue, not a structural one. What makes cracked or missing grout serious is that it gives water a direct path to the membrane and puts far more work on it than it was designed for, and it hands your insurer a lack-of-maintenance argument if the membrane later fails.
Can a leaking shower be repaired without a full retile?
Sometimes, and it is always worth having someone look before assuming the worst. If the tiles are sound, nothing is drummy, the floor is firm and the water is getting in through failed silicone or a single cracked tile, then a regrout, reseal and tile replacement at $600 to $1,200 genuinely fixes it and buys years. If the membrane itself has failed, there is no repair from the surface, because you cannot reach the membrane without removing everything on top of it. Anyone offering to fix a failed membrane with a paint-on product or a sealer over the top is selling you a delay, not a repair.
How long can I leave a leaking shower before it becomes serious?
Less time than the slow pace of the symptoms suggests. A wet-area leak in a Wagga home typically takes one to three years to show itself in the room next door, which means by the time you notice a damp skirting, the framing has usually been wet for a while already. Once water is sitting against a bottom plate and studs, you are on a clock towards timber rot and a repair that involves a carpenter as well as a tiler, and every extra month strengthens an insurer's gradual-damage argument. The month you notice it is the cheapest month it will ever be to deal with.
Leak diagnosis across Wagga.
Found something you do not like the look of?
We will tap it, read the next room and tell you straight. Free measure, no obligation.