Shower clog help

[queequeeg78]

Hello everyone. I have a question regarding pressure for my dad's shower. He gave me a description of it due to the house being a vacation beach house in mexico and I haven't been there for ages.

So he says when the shower is turned on it gives little to no water release, but him and his friend tried to remove the shower head itself to see if maybe it was the shower head and it wasn't, the water seemed to just dribble down. So then they decided to remove the hot/cold valves and turn the water on to flush out possibly crud or whatever and he said that the water pressure THROUGH the area where the hot/cold valves go the water spewed out very fast and hard. So they put everything back and the shower still is giving no water pressure. They then used a clothes hanger to see if they could feel anything in the pipe from the shower head to the hot/cold valves and they said they felt something hard. They tried vinegar for 24 hours and tried different drain cleaners but with no luck.

So he doesn't want to rip the tile out, so I am asking what other options can be done? The walls there are made out of concrete and they believe the pipes weren't isolated and maybe some way a small piece of gravel got into the pipe causing it to get stuck. Don't know how that would be possible but i don't know.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Jadnashua]

Is this a tub/shower, or just a shower?

IF any of the piping after the shower valve is galvanized, or even plain steel pipe, it may just be all rusted solid. To change from the vertical riser to the pipe for the shower arm, they often use an el...it's a right-angle, so you wouldn't easily be able to push a coat hanger past it.

It sounds like they removed the cartridge or stems from the valve and found great pressure/volume. If it is a cartridge verses a stem, the cartridge could be clogged, and replacing the cartridge with a new one would solve the problem.

A picture of the valve may elicit some more ideas.