After much Googling and little success, I'm reaching out to this forum for some help. I'm trying to find a particular style of hand held shower head and am not having much luck. Several years ago we had one of the original style Waterpik hand held shower heads. This one had a mounting bracket that would allow the shower head to sit lower in the bracket in such a way that the shower head was at normal height, with the handle of the shower head lower than the shower arm. We need a new one now and I cannot find this design at all. All of the hand held shower heads that I can find these days sit much higher. The end of the handle is at the height of the shower arm, causing the shower spray head itself to sit several inches above the shower arm. Does anyone still make the older style shower head or mounting bracket? We don't really like having the shower head sit so high. Any brand is fine, but I've had a terrible time trying to find one. Thanks.

Well...first you need to find out the worst case scenario. Add up the flow for your two body sprays, plus the flow of your shower head. That's the GPM that you need to carry to through your shower valve and to your diverter. You;ll need a valve that can pass through that volume of water. You can do what you want with an A/B/AB diverter. Coming out of the diverter is where you can run one 1/2" copper run to the shower head and a second 1/2" copper run to the body sprays. That's when using a separate on/off valve and a separate diverter. However, for your setup, you can run all three outlets from a 1/2" copper supply going into the valve and with 1/2" copper running from the valve to the fixtures. There are quite a few valves that can do what you want. One of the last houses I did I used Hansgrohe Thermobalance III valves in all of the bathrooms in the house. The TB III is an A/B/C/BC type of valve. It's also a 1/2" valve. I used it that way in a couple of the bathroms, in others the A and B outlets are looped together (let's call this new combined AB loop "D") so you now have a D/C/DC setup. "D" can be your shower head. "C" can be your body jets. "CD" can be your car wash with everything throwing water at you. In case that's confusing, think of it as the A/B/AB valve that I described in the beginning. It's an approved way to plumb the valve, and it with the TB III having ON/OFF, temp, and diverter all in one valve, you'll have an uncluttered wall. But again, besides the TB III there are other valves out there. So can you do it with a single control head? Yes. Can you do it with 1/2" copper into the valve and 1/2" copper coming out of the valve? Yes.

Thanks Patricia. I do have both - I have the slider bar with the adjustable hand held thing and then the Rain CAn thing. I NEVER shower - always bathe - and this is for my husband not really me so I want him to enjoy it - do you think using the rain shower is ok and then if you need more force or a massage, etc. you can use the handheld thing? would you recommend it this way? I cannot see my husband taking the time to remove the adjustable thing and use it. So I am relying on the shower head for him getting clean, etc. WIll the rain shower do a good job of getting him clean in a jiffy?

Grohe has designed this unit as a "retrofit" model that would normally be mounted to an existing 1/2" shower head supply that is commonly located 6-6 to 6-8 above the finish floor putting a standard shower head face at about 6-3 +/- 1" AFF so shorter people can adjust the head which often annoys taller people. Is that the case here? If so, what is the actual height of the pipe AFF? For this shower head Grohe doesn't appear to agree that the point of a rain shower is to have the water fall over you; it offers different spray patterns with manual controls on the head. I'm curious to know why you selected a retrofit unit for a new house and why a 6" extension would not be an acceptable solution if your husband wants a higher shower head and you are either tall enough to adjust it or don't care about adjusting it. The 6" Grohe extension appears to be a perfect solution for only $60 at Amazon and free installation. In any case, the adjustable handheld shower wand is clearly not intended to be used as a full height shower head so if you want to use it for that you should put it on a separate taller mounting rod adjacent to the shower unit.