Shower pan is cracking....

[Gardening Grandma]

New house, 5 years old. The master bath has a 60" fiberglass shower pan with tiled walls. The pan is cracking. It cracked the first year and the builder sent someone to repair it. It's cracking again. Supposedly it has a 5 year warranty, but I don't know exactly what that covers. I have a call into the plumbing co that installled it to find out what the warranty would cover. So far, it seems our options are to:
1) Pay to have it repaired again (about $200, and expect to repeat every few years
2) Replace the shower pan (involves removing the door, cutting the tile about 1 foot up, pulling out and installing the new pan, retiling, replacing door
3) Replacing it with tile - gets complicated because if the lip isn't exactly the same height as the old one, we'd have to replace the door. (The shower is two tiled walls and two glass sides, one of which has the door. That alone would cost about $2K to replace)

Any suggestions?

[Gardening Grandma]

We don't know for sure if the installation was faulty or if the shower pan is defective. But I'm leaning towards dealing with it now rather than continuously paying to have it repaired and wondering if it's hiding moisture problems.

[marvholly]

There appears to be an issue w/ either the pan being defective and/or the install being defective. I would REFUSE to pay for this again and contact your builder, HOA, newspaper/tv consumer hotline.

[T Skeeter]

Grandma, I think you have a defective installation. If the fiberglass shower pan is cracking, it is most likely because the pan is flexing as the shower is used. This means that the pan is not properly supported. To support and to limit the drumming noise from water hitting the bottom of fiberglass tubs and shower pans, it is a common construction practice to set the tub or pan on a bed of wet mortar. When the mortar dries, this transfers the load of someone in the shower on to the rigid framing of the house, rather than relying on a flexible shower pan to support the shower occupant.

So how to fix it? The correct way is to tear apart the shower and install a new pan correctly. (If you try to tile over the existing shower pan, the flexing will crack the grout and/or the tiles and leave you with the same problem you've got today.) The cheaper, less messy, not as reliable fix, would be to cut through a wall or ceiling, so you can get access under the shower pan, shove a wet mortar or floor leveling compound under the pan (to fill the space and transfer the load from the pan to the house framing), then repair the shower pan again. A third choice would be to tear out the fiberglass shower pan and lay a tile floor. Installing a tile floor would allow the installer to adjust the height of the curbs to accommodate the existing shower glass. Of the three choices, installing a tile shower floor would probably be the most durable, and the most expensive.

[deziloooooo]

"if it's hiding moisture problems"...that's the problem, thn you get a possible lold proble...other wise the $200 every few years isn't so bad but you don't know what other problems ar going on under there...had the same thing happen to me once..improper laid pan...bite me in the butt about 5 years later..expensive then too but fif it ..we had a raised ranch so it was on a slab but was worried about mold.