This Old House Magazine: Drip Dry
By Richard Weir
From This Old House Magazine
For too long now, a stubborn drip-drip-drip has been descending from the one-handled kitchen faucet in the home of Richard Trethewey, This Old House's plumbing and heating consultant. Droplets from a two-handled laundry-room faucet have been falling with the relentless beat of a metronome, too. "Most people will ignore a dripping faucet out of fear or ignorance," says Richard. If they deal with it at all, it's usually by cranking the handle so hard they risk tearing a rubber washer or cracking something and making the leak worse. At his own Second Empire house, it's more the case of the cobbler's child whose feet go unshod. When Richard does finally find a free morning to break out the wrenches, he stems the tide in both sinks within half an hour. A homeowner with a little wherewithal should be able to finish similarly simple repairs in less than an hour. "Fixing a faucet drip won't solve the world's water woes," says Richard. "But it will save the finish on your enamel sink and end your Chinese water torture."
Single-Handed Cartridge Faucet
The first task in any faucet repair is to shut off the water feed by closing the valves under the sink; if there
are none, Richard shuts the water main. He turns on the faucet to bleed the pipes of water, then plugs the sink's drain with a rag. "The smaller the part," says Richard, "the more it wants to take a dive down the drain."
To figure out the next step, "look at the faucet and try to understand how it was put together, then go in reverse," advises Richard. This single-handled kitchen faucet has a cartridge under the handle. The cartridge has holes that mix the hot and cold water to deliver different temperatures depending on how the handle is turned. If it's worn or cracked, water will seep through to the spout. To remove and replace it, Richard first uncovers it by using a pocket knife to pry off the decorative plastic cap—similar to those on two-handled "hot" and "cold" units—to expose the screw that holds the handle in place. Richard removes the screw; then he gently wiggles the handle back and forth to loosen it and slides it off.
The faucet handle isn't the only thing between Richard and the cartridge; he must unscrew the bonnet—being careful not to scratch this chrome cover for the cartridge assembly—with a pair of slip-joint pliers. Then he uses needlenosed pliers to grab the U-shaped retainer clip, which slides through the faucet base and around the cartridge to secure it in place. As he takes out the pieces, he carefully lines them up to the side so he's sure not to lose anything or mix up the order of the parts when it's time to reassemble the faucet.
Richard grips the stem of the exposed cartridge with his pliers. To overcome the suction resistance of the rubber O-rings at the top of the cartridge, he pulls up firmly, sliding the unit straight out without any side-to-side twists. Had the leak been coming from the base of the handle, Richard would have known that the O-rings needed replacing. But since this is a case of a dripping spout, he's already surmised that the cartridge is the problem. He installs a new one, making sure that he places it in the same position as the one he just pulled out, so the holes in its side that deliver the hot and cold water to the spout will not be mixed up. He then fits the retainer clip snugly into its slot and reassembles the bonnet and handle.
Two-Handled Stem Faucet
Richard turns his attention to his two-handled laundry faucet. Here, the dripping spout indicates that the problem's in a handle, so he pops the cap off the cold-water handle to reveal an encrusted screw. To get it off, "push down with all your might—if you strip the head, you're up a creek," he says. But the fused handle is another matter, requiring the finesse of a faucet-handle puller. (See "Tool Box," below.)
Next Richard has to remove the packing nut, which secures the stem into the faucet body. He loosens it with an adjustable wrench and pulls out the entire stem assembly with needlenosed pliers. The seat washer—a rubber disk on the stem's underside and the usual suspect in a spout drip—looks scarred, and its fastener screw is badly corroded. He's able to twist the screw off without snapping its shank, though he was prepared to drill it out and rethread the hole with his "tap and die" kit, if necessary.
Before replacing the washer, Richard performs a little surgery on the protruding edge into which the washer fits. He files away the pitted wall and replaces it with a nickel/copper-alloy retainer bowl, which will be held in place by a new washer screw. "Sometimes it's better to rebuild the stem than to rush out for a new part," he says. "Replacement parts for older faucets can be hard to find."
Richard finds an identical-size replacement washer in his collection and fastens it on with the new brass screw. "For a short-term fix—in a pinch—you can flip the washer over if it's smooth on the other side," he suggests. Before placing the stem back on the valve seat (the cylindrical piece that butts against the washer and creates a seal with it when the faucet is off), he removes the seat with counterclockwise turns of a special seat wrench and checks it for burrs caused by scraping and corrosion. "If the seat is badly mangled," he says, "you could replace the washer every four days, but it'll just keep leaking." This one is undamaged, so he doesn't replace it; he just seals it with pipe joint compound and reassembles the handle.__________________________________
Tool Box: Faucet-Handle Puller
Trying to free a corroded and fused handle from its stem can be a struggle of twists, pulls, and whacks that may cause more damage than the cracked washer that started it all. The pros solve this problem with a faucet-handle puller, a simple screw tool that forcefully lifts the frozen handle off without scratching its finish. "It's kind of like uncorking a wine bottle with a corkscrew," says Richard Trethewey. Richard slides the puller's shaft into the screw hole on the faucet handle and positions the puller's two arms under the base of the handle. As he twists the puller's handgrip clockwise, as if he were tightening a screw, the arms rise along the shaft and lift the handle free of the faucet stem.
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