While purchasing and installing a new corner shower may be a complicated experience, understanding the individual components that make up the overall shower unit can make the process a lot easier. A corner shower consists of a shower stall, which lines the walls of the bathroom the shower is attached to, a shower enclosure, which covers the sides of the shower exposed to the bathroom, and a shower pan, also called a shower base or shower tray. When installing a new corner shower, choosing from the selection of corner shower pans on the market is an important step.
What Are Corner Shower Pans?
The shower pan is basically just another name for the floor of the shower. Shower pans are usually prefabricated and made to suit a variety of standard shapes and sizes. Custom shower floors are often referred to as bases or trays, with the term shower pan being reserved strictly for pre-fabricated models. This means that a shower pan can be purchased in a choice of standard sizes, ranging from compact corner showers, to designs for more substantial units. The shapes of pans available are also limited to the most common corner showers, including squares, rectangles, quadrants, and offset quadrants.
Why Is Choosing The Right Pan So Crucial?
Choosing the correct style and type of pan is important because it is not only the portion of the shower that will receive the most contact on a regular basis, it is also the one that will need to support the most weight and, therefore, need to be extremely durable and long lasting. Choosing a shower pan is usually the first step of the process and, therefore, will determine the size and shape of the corner shower unit being installed.
Corner Shower Pan Materials?
The most common materials that have been used for building corner shower pans are acrylic, fiberglass, and an acrylic fiberglass blend. While acrylic used to be the standard, some consumers were unhappy with its overly ‘plastic’ feel. It was durable for a time, but tended to wear and crack with extended use. Fiberglass, on the other hand, was much more durable, but tended to have a rougher texture which consumers didn’t like as much. In order to resolve both issues, manufacturers began using a mixture of fiberglass and acrylic that provided an extremely durable material with a more solid, but smooth feel to it. This is the most common material for all prefabricated shower pans n the market today.
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