A long-standing customer — someone we've helped with everything from CCTV to car troubles — got in touch about a digital shower that had stopped delivering hot water. The unit was discontinued, no spare parts were available, and replacing it wasn't straightforward, because the customer loved the look of the existing control panel and was particular about how it would appear once reinstalled.
To make things trickier, the customer admitted they'd already had a go at fixing it themselves and had caused a small leak in the process — so we potentially had more than one fault to untangle. With no spares available anywhere, a straight repair using new parts simply wasn't an option.
We sourced a second, faulty unit of the same model with the aim of combining the two into one good working shower. On inspection, both the flow and temperature valves on the original unit had seized — almost certainly a result of the earlier leak. We managed to free these valves but didn't want to risk further damage by relying on them long-term, so we used the donor unit as the foundation for the repair instead.
The donor unit's valves were in much better condition, but it had its own fault: it couldn't switch between the two shower heads. We traced this to a faulty solenoid valve, which we replaced using the working part salvaged from the original unit.
With everything reassembled, test results looked good — until we connected the original control panel and found there was no hot water control at all. Swapping in the control panel from the donor unit solved it, and the shower worked perfectly.
The root cause turned out to be a faulty control panel — but the customer's own attempt at a fix had caused a leak and seized both the flow and temperature valves along the way. Calling us in sooner wouldn't have avoided the need for a donor unit, since no spares existed either way, but it would have saved a good deal of fiddly valve-swapping and troubleshooting.
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