The shower that tingles: today's job, not this month's - the live-current signal

Skip the rest of this page if only for its first line: a tingle through the water is electric current finding your body as a path to earth, in a room designed to make you wet and barefoot. It never means "just the pump", and no fix lives inside the house until an earth-leakage device is proven to work or the fault is found by someone who owns a meter for it.

The minute that decides the next day

Find the ELCB/RCD protecting the bathroom - the test-button breaker at the board (some showers carry one on the cable). Press its T with the shower on: a healthy device trips instantly and stays honest; a device that doesn't trip is a dead safety net, and the shower must not be used until it or the fault is repaired - that single sentence is the entire interim policy of this desk. After any trip, reset and leave the power off to the shower until the diagnosis below happens: re-arming the net around a live fault is not a fix, it is a countdown.

The three faults, in the order the bench finds them

• The element's insulation: a shower heater is a live coil sleeping inches from water inside a mineral sleeve; when the sleeve cracks - scale, age, a dry-fire start - current leaks into the water path itself. The pro test is an insulation (megger) check from element to case; the element is a standard replaceable part, and this is the fault that "a new element fixed it for years" describes.
• The missing earth or bonding: metal frames, the casing and pipework within the shower's reach should sit on the equipotential bonding grid so leakage becomes a tripped breaker instead of a tingle through a bare foot. Older work, "temporary" rewirings and the rebar-tying improvisations remove exactly this safety - if the fault is a missing bond, the fix is copper and crimps, not new electronics, and it is the licensed person's page of the work.
• A shared or borrowed neutral: current from another circuit returns through yours and the symptoms are maddening - the tingle changes when the kettle next door is on. The fix is a re-termination and a circuit map, again a meter-and-licence job; the reason it's listed here is that it's the common diagnosis when the element tests good, so the desk saves you the element purchase.

The honest temporary, and the permanent

The honest temporary is the one the neighbours will offer - run the shower off the tank only, element switched off at the isolation while you bathe, on heated-water-in-advance days - it is a genuine zero-current path, and the desk says so while printing its price: it is a work-around that leaves the fault live in the wall, and it is only on this page so that nobody invents a worse one. The permanent is short: insulation-tested element, proven ELCB, bonding re-made to the standard, all signed by the person whose trade this is - the electrical-boundary chapters of this site. Between those two pages lives everything the "new shower head", "plumber first", or "the tingle is in my head" advice on the market's forum would have you spend. A tingle is the house's last warning; the fix costs far less than the next event does, in money and in every other currency.