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Frequently Asked Questions
If there is no door, what keeps the water in?
The floor does most of the work. A wet room floor is laid to a deliberate fall toward a linear channel or a point drain, so water leaves faster than it can travel outward.
The screen handles the rest, intercepting direct spray from the showerhead. It is a splash barrier rather than a seal, which is why its position relative to the outlet matters more than its size.
Get the fall wrong and no screen will compensate: water tracks across a flat floor regardless of how much glass is standing in the way.
How long does the screen need to be?
Long enough to stand between the showerhead and the open side, which usually means reaching past the point where a person stands rather than merely covering the tray.
A screen that stops short leaves a gap exactly where the spray rebounds off a body, which is the direction most water actually travels.
Where the room allows it, adding a short hinged return panel at the open end catches that rebound without closing the walk-in feel.
Does it need a wet room floor, or will a tray do?
Either works, and they are genuinely different jobs. A tray gives a defined, pre-formed fall and a known waterproof boundary, and is far more forgiving to install.
A tanked wet room floor gives a level threshold with no upstand at all, which is what makes step-free access possible, but it puts the waterproofing entirely on the membrane and the fall.
For accessibility the level floor is usually the reason for choosing walk-in at all. For a straightforward open shower, a low-profile tray is the lower-risk route.
Is it colder than an enclosed shower?
Noticeably, and it is the most common complaint. An enclosed cubicle traps warm humid air; an open one lets it move away, so there is a draught unless the room is warm.
The usual mitigations are a warm room to begin with, underfloor heating, and placing the opening away from the door and any window.
A longer screen or a return panel also helps, at the cost of some of the openness that motivated the choice.
What stops the screen moving?
A wall profile and, on longer screens, a bracing bar to the wall or ceiling. A freestanding pane of glass has real leverage at the top and needs restraint.
The bracing bar is structural rather than decorative, and removing it because it looks untidy is how screens end up flexing at the base.
On a frameless screen the fixing into the wall carries everything, so the substrate matters as much as it would for a grab bar.