Waipori Satinjet Slide Rail Shower product reviews

Methven is iconic when it comes to shower and taps in New Zealand, and you can always be sure you will not only love their products, but know you are getting great quality that has been designed, engineered and manufactured in NZ.

There are plenty of shower choices out there and for me it was finding the right mix between hard, but not the blow the skin off your back hard, and soft, but not so soft you actually wonder what the actual purpose is. Waipori was the perfect blend, giving me enough pressure and enough coverage to ensure I actually enjoyed my shower experience.

I have travelled a lot for business and there is nothing worse, lets be honest, than a crappy shower that dribbles out and takes an hour just to rinse the conditioner from your hair. This is why I love my Waipori shower. It rinses effectively and ensures I don't have to do my "shower dance" to get all the soap of my body, but best of all I know it does so without wasting all of our precious tank water, so I can shower a wee bit longer and not feel guilty.

And to top it off the whole set-up looks really great in our fully tiled ensuite, but looks equally as impressive in our son's acrylic shower. We love that is not just a boring, typical, round shower head - its got a soft square edge to it we really love.

Recently, I found myself trying to decide between upgrading the bathroom shower, which did little more than dribble away in one corner of the "Shub", or give up and fall back to "bathing" - and there's something about the thought of simmering away in a weak soup of dirt, sweat and anything else that happened to get stuck on me after doing landscaping that just made the thought of running a bath somewhat shudder-inducing. So, it was time to bite the bullet and brush off the old plumbing skills I learned as a teenager living on a rural block.

When the Waipori SatinJet kit arrived, I was really pleased to see that everything I would need, barring a screwdriver, was in the box - everything that sits on the outside of the wall, including an Allen Key to tighten all the grub screws. Securely wrapped and covered to maintain the finish, all of the pieces were covered in the instruction manual which takes you through the installation process from start to finish, with the notable exception of actually mounting the first piece in the chain - the Elbow. If you are replacing or retrofitting a rail system, then chances are there's already an elbow mounted to the wall. If you are lucky, you can unscrew it, wrap a bit of sealant tape on it, and screw the shiny new elbow on easily and securely.

I wasn't so lucky. It seems that whoever fitted the previous, now-defunct, unit decided that no-one would ever escape their horrible style choice, and applied some heavy-duty glue to the unit, effectively welding the elbow to the mixer outlet pipe with some ungodly-strong chemical adhesive. So... I had to work around it. Thankfully, it had a standard thread fitting that the Waipori hose would screw on to nicely... with a little thread-seal tape for good measure..

Removing the old rail was simple - since it didn't need to survive the process the rusted-in screws were simply snapped off and new mounting holes drilled next to them, so that the new fittings hid the scars. Fitting the rail took all of 5 minutes, another 10 minutes assembling, checking and pressure-testing the water-carrying fittings, and that was it. From picking up the first tool, to wiping down the newly-fitted shower system was under half an hour. Honestly, it took me longer to unbox the parts and read the instructions!

Now, this place has a "mixed-pressure" environment, meaning the cold water comes in at mains pressure, but the hot water - supplied by a cylinder that also runs through a wet-back firebox - is rated at "low pressure" - this can make for a lot of hassles when it comes to using a mixer system that allows two unequal pressure systems to interact. If you open up the hot line a bit, and add too much cold, the cold water can actually push itself backwards into the hot line, causing all sorts of icy shower hijinx! Thankfully, Methven are masters of this kind of scenario, and the Waipori has a design that reduces the troubles and gives you excellent performance regardless. You need only pull out a tiny green flow-restrictor in the base of the hand-piece and you'll have stunning showers again!

Going from "jamming myself in the corner of the bath, trying to avoid jamming my shins on the bath's hot water tap or losing my footing and braining myself on the wall and tearing a kidney out on the bath's taps as I go" to being able to stand in a safe spot in the middle of the bath and still have water reaching me at pressure, and being able to do it affordably without having to call in an expensive tradesperson to do it for me, is nothing short of an amazing feeling. Methven have designed a system that anyone can do as long as they actually read the easy-to-grasp instructions. There are a couple of odd bits in the diagrams, but they make perfect sense when you actually get the parts in your hands and have a look at them - particularly the "mounting the rail" section.

Overall, this is a stunning bit of kit with some incredible design features - how they found a way to take a dribble of water and turn it into a decent shower spray is impressive indeed. My only teensy gripe is the soap dish. It's stylish, it's elegant, it's easy to clean... but it also sits right under the hand-piece... which dribbles for 15-20 seconds when I turn off the shower. This creates soapy splashes which really bug me for some strange reason. I would have liked to have seen an 'ambidexterous" design which could be fitted to sit either side of the rail. I imagine it shouldn't be too hard to come up with a design that can be fitted either side, either by flipping it over or rotating it... still, as that is my only issue with this kit, it is impossible to class it as anything other than a raving success in my books!