The braid stops it bursting. It does not stop it leaking.
A braided shower hose is two things: a rubber tube that carries the water, and a woven steel sleeve wrapped round it that takes the pressure and stops the tube ballooning out. The sleeve is armour, not plumbing. Which means the hose has a failure mode that looks impossible from outside — the inner tube splits, and the braid stays perfect. Water escapes into the space between the tube and the sleeve, and then does the only thing water does in a confined space: it follows the fibres, and it comes out wherever it can. Often that is at a fitting, sometimes at the far end from the split.
That is why the most common wrong repair on this page is replacing the washer under the nut that is dripping. The washer is a fifty-cent part and it is often the answer, but if the water is arriving at that nut from inside the braid rather than past the seal, a new washer changes nothing and the second attempt is a whole hose on a wall that is now wet. The test that separates them takes a minute and is worth doing before anything is bought.
Dry it, squeeze along it, run it hot
Switch the shower off, dry the entire hose with a towel — the fittings, the braid, both ends — and then run your hand along it from one end to the other, squeezing firmly. Then turn the water on hot and watch for thirty seconds.
- Water appears at a nut, running down from the joint — at the mixer end or at the head end — and the braid stays dry. That is the seal: the washer, or the thread behind it. Cheap, and the right thing to check first.
- A patch of the braid goes damp, or water beads out through the weave where your hand just passed. That is the inner tube, and the only repair is a new hose. A hose with a split tube cannot be fixed by tightening anything, because the leak is not at a joint at all.
- Water appears at the plastic collar where the hose meets the handset, or the collar is cracked. That is the fitting, and depending on the design it is a new hose or a new handset.
- It drips with the shower switched off, and the wall around the mixer is damp too. Then it is not the hose — it is the outlet or the mixer body, and you are looking in the wrong place.
Two details make the difference between a repair and a repeat. Use a silicone washer rather than a rubber one, because rubber hardens and takes a set within a season and starts weeping again. And tighten by hand plus a quarter turn — not with a spanner, because the nut is usually chrome-plated brass over a plastic body and a spanner crushes the washer flat or splits the collar, at which point a five-minute job becomes a new hose and possibly a new handset.