Repair of leak in ceiling

[Dannad]

We fully renovated our 3 bed semi 3 years ago. The main bathroom is directly over the kitchen. There is a leak from the bathroom down through the ceiling which we only noticed initially because it dripped onto our smoke alarm causing it to short circuit presumably and the alarm would continue to ring until the drip stopped. This happened very sporadically initially and we did various things upstairs to address it....resealed the shower tray, re-set the tiles to make sure no gap between them and tray etc but none of these things have worked. It's time now to go up through the ceiling we think to find the leak and fix it. (there's no discolouration or other signs of the leak on the ceiling but water continues to drip down through smoke alarm intermittently.....i feel there could be alot of unseen damage above the ceiling..).

What would best process be?get a quote from a builder to remove piece of celiling and replace it after plumbing work complete? re plumbing work, wait til ceiling is removed and just have a look ourselves?? i presume it would be impossible for anyone to quote us for the complete job given the unknown element?

If anyone has any advice or experience of this i would be very grateful if you could give me a few pointers.
Thanks.

 

[maureen]

hi, we had a similar problem and got a plumber to go up through the
downstairs ceiling and fix the problem - leak was in the upstairs ensuite. Many of our neighbours also had same problem and one of them had to get
all the pipes re-done as it turns out the original plumbers /builders made a mistake on measurments in ensuite but went ahead with and made do with their 'stuff'. not thinking or caring of future problems. -we have problems with shower tray overflowing from time to time. Our neighbours having fixed the problem totally seem to be sorted.