You know, I was all set to launch into an article on how to change out a sink faucet in 232 easy steps. This, of course, would be part of my series on How To Be Your Own Plumber.
But then I thought, why bother? The number of people who would actually be interested in taking on a job like this is so small already. Do an intersection with the handful that read this blog, and you get a fat empty set.
Anyhow, as long as you have a relatively modern sink faucet, it’s a pretty easy operation. You can pretty much follow the instructions given and that’s it. I was able to change out our approximately 10 year old faucet in about two hours. One hour of that time was spent trying to figure out why I couldn’t shut off the hot water from the shutoff under the sink. I still have no idea - ended up shutting it off at the water heater.
This is also a single handle faucet - I’m not familiar with the ones that use two handles for hot and cold. Actually, we hate those. So that was a fairly easy choice to make. After shutting off the water, you basically only have to disconnect the hot and cold supply lines underneath that feed the faucet. This can usually be accomplished with two crescent wrenches (sometimes I think you can do it with only one). YMMV.
Then, you remove the two nuts that bolt the faucet to the underside of the sink. Disconnect the sink plug arm - I forget the name of this thingy. It’s basically when you want to plug the sink, you pull up a lever? Well, you want to disconnect that lever from the control on the bottom.
Remove the old faucet, put in the new one in (make sure to put the plastic or rubber gasket on the bottom first) and just do everything you did in reverse order. Bolt it down, connect the supply lines, turn on the water, check for leaks, reconnect the sink plug arm.
Done, and I guess done. Make sure that nothing leaks, because nothing ruins your day more than having to paddle around the house in an upside-down umbrella …
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September 2nd, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Bryan…Im 70 and never did plumbing . It took me 20 min. to change out one of the twin handles . The valve that you shut and the water still was not off is defective. they are easy to change and cost little at your hardware store . The one in the kitchen is a bit easer as there is more space to work .
September 3rd, 2009 at 11:09 am
These are fairly simple to replace you just need to take your time. Checking for leaks is the most important. You don’t want to start building mold underneath.
September 23rd, 2009 at 5:25 am
Hi, Bryan. I don’t have any plumbing comments, but I wanted to mention that I have tried to comment on “Cheap Eats” many times but I always get a WordPress error. Last time, I wrote a really long comment and then it threw it back in my face. I’m not upset or complaining, but just wanted to let you know that this might be happening to other readers as well and undermining the number of comments you might get. It could be my set up (Firefox, Mac OS X), but I’m not sure. I do have Java and cookies enabled, so I’m a bit puzzled as to why this happens…and it only happens on Cheap Eats and not here on Cheaplander. Go figure.
September 23rd, 2009 at 8:54 am
@mr champ - I realized this afterwards that the valve was probably defective or old - I don’t think I’ve ever touched it since I bought the house!
@800 - Agree on the leaks, I learned my lesson the hard way when I assumed that nothing was leaking. You need to keep checking every so often after a repair
@orchid - thanks for letting me know, sorry that has been happening! That’s really strange since it’s the same version of wordpress. Is there a particular error it gives? It’s weird, I’m also on Firefox MacOSX so I figured it would error for me too… In any case, I’ve been meaning to upgrade both sites again later this year, so maybe it’ll make the problem go away.
September 29th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Sorry for the delay. I did a test post this time, and it worked, so I can’t say what the error message was, but I believe it was pretty generic (no code or number attached to it - just a big old page saying “WordPress Error”. If it happens again, I’ll be sure to note it!