How to maintain and look after your wet room
A correctly built wet room needs very little maintenance, but the little it needs matters. Here's the routine that keeps a tanked floor performing for decades.
How do you maintain a wet room?
Maintain a wet room by cleaning it like any tiled bathroom, lifting and rinsing the drain hair trap monthly, checking silicone junctions annually, and re-sealing silicone as soon as it shows signs of lifting rather than waiting for a leak to appear.
Weekly and monthly cleaning
Clean tiles and grout with a standard bathroom cleaner suited to the tile type — avoid anything acidic on natural stone. Lift and rinse the drain's removable hair trap monthly; a slow-draining floor is almost always a blocked trap rather than a fault in the falls.
Annual checks that actually matter
Once a year, check the silicone at the drain flange, the shower screen junction, and any internal corner for lifting, cracking or black spotting. These are the junctions protecting the membrane underneath, and catching a failed bead of silicone costs a tube of sealant. Leaving it can eventually let water reach the membrane's weakest points — the joints — even though the membrane itself is sound.
Check that the extraction fan's overrun timer is still firing after a shower and that the grille isn't clogged with dust, since reduced airflow is often mistaken for a ventilation upgrade being needed when it's actually just needing a clean.
Signs something needs attention
Watch for grout that stays dark rather than drying back to its original colour, silicone that has visible black mould within its first year, or water taking noticeably longer to clear from the floor than it used to. None of these are emergencies on their own, but all three are worth investigating before they become one.
What not to do
Don't grout over a movement joint where silicone was originally used — internal corners, the drain flange and the screen junction need to flex, and grout there will crack. Don't use a pressure washer on wet room tiling; it can force water past grout joints in a way normal use never does.