Traditional Shower Kits

Traditional shower installation are usually exposed, that is the water outlet from the valve is on the outside of the wall and supplies the shower head(s) via a chrome rigid riser which runs up the wall. A traditional concealed shower valve has controls set on a plate which is fixed to the wall and the water outlet from the valve is on the inside of the wall. Usually the wall plate on a concealed valve will be chrome plated. We also supply Burlington valves with the option of a ceramic back plate and we can also re-plate all our traditional shower valves in polished nickel, brushed nickel or satin nickel.

A typical traditional shower installation includes a valve, overhead shower and a hand held shower either on a cradle on the chrome riser pipe or on a separate slide rail. With this kind of setup you may often find a shower valve with a single outlet supplying water to a riser on which there is a diverter (lever control) which switches between the overhead and hand-held shower heads - with this kind of setup only one shower head can be supplied with water at a time. Alternatively a valve with two outlets can be used, in these cases there will usually be a single temperature control and two independent flow controls on the valve to control the flow of water to each of the two shower heads. It is also possible to use a shower valve with a built in diverter, but usually this will give you less fine control of the flow of water than the other two configurations.

For installations over a bath (with a shower curtain or shower screen) rather than in an enclosure it is possible to have a traditional shower attached to the top of a traditional bath shower mixer tap, these kinds of installations will use the diverter on the tap to switch the flow of water from the tap spout to the shower. A second diverter can be fitted on the riser above the tap to allow switching between an overhead shower and a hand held shower. When constructing a shower with a water supply coming from a tap its important to realise this will not have the automatic temperature control and anti-scald safety that you get when using a thermostatic shower valve. For the best of both worlds you can use a shower valve with an integrated bath spout, this keeps the thermostatic element of the valve and can supply water to a shower configuration as well as fill your bath.