Saturday, September 29, 2012

Another plumbing story. This one ended well.

The garbage disposal was jammed. I know how to fix that. In the drawer beside the kitchen sink is a special crank just for fixing garbage disposer jams. I got the crank out and pulled out the stuff in the cabinet under the sink.

It was wet, everywhere. I unjammed the disposer and then went hunting for the leak.

The leak was a slow drip from the faucet valve. It took a long time to find the drip. The drip started from the cold water hose, then transferred over to the spray hose where the two hoses touched. It was a slow investigation. The hoses wer behind the sink and plumbing, where it is dark and cramped.

After hours of looking, I realzied I could spot the leak by wrapping paper towels around the hoses at various intervals to see which towels got wet.

It took me a while longer to figure out how to remove the faucet valve.  The bolt I needed to turn was in a very cramped location. I had to hold the wrench with the tips of my fingers.

After I got the faucet out, the seal around spray hose developed a second leak. I didn't know that though. We went to Home Depot, bought a replacement seal that turned out to be the wrong seal, went back to Home Depot, bought the right seal. Replaced the seal. Reinstalled the faucet valve.

Of course it still leaked.

Removed the faucet valve again. Did more investigating and saw that there was still a cold water leak.

Went back to Home Depot and bought a nice new faucet with universal plumbing connectors.

Started to install the new faucet, but found that the universal plumbing connectors didn't work for my plumbing.

Back to Home Depot to buy a converter.

While installing the converter I noticed that the old water hose attached to a converter, which attached to my plumbing. If I removed the old water hose and the old converter, then the new faucet would attach to my plumbing just fine.

I feel good about this faucet. It works well. Much better than the old faucet. Since I removed a set of water hoses and converters during the instalation, there is less that can go wrong in the future.

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