Plumber's Bathroom Leaks

Yes, the cobbler's kids need shoes, the mechanic's car wont start and the plumber's bathroom leaks.

As I was sitting in our master bathroom, looking out the window, I noticed water running down the roof of the laundry/outside cooking area.  I tried to use a mirror to see around the corner where the pipes lead to the 3rd floor bathroom but could not see the leak.

Daeng got a ladder out and went onto the roof and took a a picture of where the water was coming from.  Now, in Thailand, the bathroom is a wet room.  What that means is the complete room is built to be wet.  In this bathroom, we put a squat toilet in, against my better judgement.  We did that as the rest of the family said they wanted it.  CLICK HERE to see that story from 2010.

It seems to be the only time the water leaks down onto the roof is when the boys take long showers.  (I can remember the long showers as a young man.) To find where the leak was coming from we started off by spraying lots of water into the toilet.  Yea, no leaks there.  Next we sprayed lots of water into the floor shower drain; yea again.  Then we plugged the floor drain and flooded the complete room to about an inch up the wall.  Yea, no leaks so far.

That leaves only the raised floor to flood.  Almost immediately after spraying water onto the raised floor and behind the squat toilet the water started leaking onto the roof.  That must be it.  We used powered cleanser and brushes and cleaned the area well.  We than put a fan blowing into the room to dry it up.

The next morning we used white "Dap" bathroom caulking, that we had brought from America, and sealed up all the corners including where the box for the squat toilet meets the raised floor.  It looked good.  We put a fan on it overnight to make sure it would dry well.

In the morning, when we tested it, we could see that caulking did not stick in the back along the wall. We think there must have been water still in the cracks where we caulked.  Daeng said that US caulking and Thai tile did not go together.  We laughed but cleaned it all us again, removing the caulking we had just done on the corners at the raised floor.

Again, we put a fan on to run over night and Daeng went to the tile store to buy some fine, red grout to use the next day.

Well, in the morning after breakfast at the Mae Sai morning market and some exercise on the Temple equipment, we got on it and grouted all the corner of the squat toilet box and raised floor.  It was a lot of work using the red grout but it does look good.  We will have to see how it works out when we test it tomorrow.

March 26th update: We flooded the complete bathroom and "Yea, no leakage!"  The Plumber and Little Thai Girl beat the water monster, again!