Shower: No Water Coming Out

Is it the shower, or the whole house?

Turn on the basin taps in the same bathroom, hot and cold, then the kitchen cold tap. This thirty-second check saves a lot of wasted effort.

• No water anywhere: the supply to the house has stopped. The shower is fine; see no cold water from the taps.
• Cold works but no hot anywhere: the boiler or cylinder has stopped. A thermostatic shower with no hot supply will often give no water at all, by design.
• Kitchen works but bathroom cold taps and toilets are dry: in an older house the loft tank has emptied, which also stops any shower fed from it.
• Every tap is normal: the fault is in the shower itself. Carry on below.

Take the head and hose out of the question

Unscrew the hose from the shower valve or riser outlet (hand-tight in most cases), point the outlet into a bucket and turn the shower on. If water comes out of the bare outlet, the valve is working and the blockage is in the hose or head.

Shower heads block with limescale in hard-water areas like London; soak the head in a mix of white vinegar and water for a few hours, then rub the nozzles with your thumb. Look inside the hose connector at each end for a small filter or flow restrictor, which can clog with grit after the water supply has been off. A hose that has kinked inside its metal sleeve can stop the flow completely while looking fine from outside; straighten it out along its length, and if it stays kinked, replace it. Most UK hoses and heads use standard half-inch threads, so most replacements fit, though some electric showers and designer kits use their own connections: check before you buy.

If nothing comes out of the bare outlet, the problem is further back. Identify your shower type, because each fails differently.

Electric shower: power on, no water

An electric shower is the box on the wall with its own controls, switched by a ceiling pull-cord in the bathroom or a wall switch just outside it. It heats cold mains water as it passes through. If the display or neon lights up but no water comes out, the usual causes are a closed or seized isolation valve on the cold feed, a blocked inlet filter just inside the unit, or a failed solenoid valve, the electrically operated valve that opens when you press start. Some units have a low-pressure or fault light that shows when flow is too weak to run safely.

The only safe checks are outside the cover: that the pull-cord switch is on, that the circuit has not tripped at the consumer unit, and that any isolation valve you can reach on the supply pipe outside the unit is open (slot in line with the pipe). The inlet filter and solenoid sit behind the cover beside live terminals on a high-current circuit.

The full breakdown of electric shower faults, including tripping and no heat, is in electric shower stopped working.

Never take the cover off an electric shower without switching it off at the pull-cord and at the consumer unit. If the shower has tripped the circuit more than once, smells hot or shows scorch marks, leave it off until it has been inspected.

Thermostatic mixer: no water at all

A mixer shower blends hot and cold from your existing supplies. Thermostatic ones have a built-in anti-scald feature: if the cold supply fails, the cartridge shuts down the flow rather than deliver scalding water, and many also cut out or run to a trickle when the hot fails. That is why a boiler fault or a closed cold valve can look like a dead shower.

If both supplies are fine at the basin, the likely faults are these, roughly in order of how often they happen.

• A service valve on the hot or cold feed left closed after other work. Concealed valves often have them behind an access panel or under the bath panel.
• Blocked inlet filters. Most bar mixers have a small mesh filter in each inlet, behind the wall connection, which catch grit when the water has been off.
• Check valves in the inlets that have stuck shut. They stop hot and cold water crossing between supplies.
• A thermostatic cartridge seized with limescale, which is common in London and shows as a stiff or dead temperature control.

Power shower or pumped mixer has stopped

If your shower relies on a pump (a separate unit, often in the airing cupboard or under the bath, fed from a loft tank and cylinder), listen when you turn it on. A hum or whirr with no water usually means the pump is running dry or airlocked, typically after the loft tank has emptied or the cylinder has been drained. Silence means the pump is not getting power or its flow switch has failed. Pumps that have been running dry for a while can burn out, so switch it off at its spur rather than keep trying.

Clearing an airlock often means refilling the tank, then running the hot and cold taps nearest the pump until the flow is steady, before restarting. The general method is in airlock in water pipes. If the pump runs but the flow is weak rather than absent, see low shower pressure.

When to call someone and what they do

A shower that has stopped is usually an inconvenience, not an emergency, provided the rest of the house has water; how urgent a broken shower is sets out the cases that cannot wait. It becomes urgent when it is the only way someone in the house can wash, when water is leaking from behind the valve or through the ceiling below (see a shower leaking), or when the shower is an electric unit that has tripped, sparked or smells of burning.

An engineer starts where you left off: confirms the supplies at the valve, isolates it, cleans or replaces the inlet filters and check valves, and tests or swaps the cartridge or solenoid. Common parts such as cartridges, solenoids and filter washers are specific to the maker, so a photo of the shower and its model plate helps. With us that is the £60 call-out at any hour, with the repair price agreed on site before any work starts. If the whole house has lost water or pressure too, book a low water pressure repair or a no-water emergency call-out instead, because the shower is only the symptom.