How to Fix A Leaky Faucet – Single-handle Faucet by Kohler. By Best Plumbing in Seattle. Serving King, Pierce and Snohomish Counties. Visit us online http://goo.gl/ry00ms or call 206-633-1700.
Want to know how to fix a single-handle faucet that is leaking? Colin from Best Plumbing walks us through the steps to repair your faucet on your own.
Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Colin from Best Plumbing. We’ve been serving the King, Pierce and Snohomish counties for more than 40 years.
Today we’re going to talk about how to fix a leaky faucet.
We’ve got the water shut off. We’re going to verify that it’s off by turning the faucet on both hot and cold. We’re then going to take our Allen keys and we’re going to loosen the set screw. Once you loosen the set screw, you can pull the handle off.
Then you need a crescent wrench or an adjustable smooth jaw wrench and you’re going to pull the bonnet or the capturing nut off. Which is going to allow us access to the cartridge, which in this case, this cartridge is going to be the cause of the leak.
This is the cartridge. It’s a ceramic cartridge. So you have three ports in the bottom. One’s hot, one’s cold and then the other one is a mix. So depending on your positioning your handle there it’s going to mix the hot and cold. Something like this is going to have may be problems as the ceramic wears, that’s the ceiling surface the ceramic is going to be kind of like two plates together stopping that water. And then the other thing is the gasket right here. That can also cause a drippy faucet.
When you pull this out (cartridge) you need to ID it. If you don’t know that this is a Kohler faucet, you will generally find something on that stem. Take a picture of the stem as well as the faucet and then, in my case, I would take the picture of this as well as the faucet and send it off to our purchasers at Best Plumbing and they would help me find the availability for it.
When you rebuild these faucets you are actually just replacing this cartridge to stop the leaking. You’re not actually going to do any repairs of this cartridge.
Now that we’ve identified the cartridge, we’re going to reinstall it. It’s always a good idea to put some faucet lube on the ceiling surfaces. This is just a silicone, it’s food-grade so you don’t have to worry about putting something that’s bad for you in there because you’re going to be using this water and it just makes the seals soft and supple. It also acts as an anti-seeze on the threads. I like to put it on the bonnet, so just put it around the threads there. There’s two little bumps that stick out of the bottom of the cartridge and if you look inside here you’re going to find those same two bumps and that’s going to align everything. So those need to, it’s critical for those to go back into that same spot.
Now we’re going to fit this back in there. You’re going to feel it depress. Sometimes what you can do is kind of put in there where you know they’re not going to align and then just turn it and you’ll see it…see how it pushed in right there? Then you know that you’ve got it in there.
Then you take your bonnet, get that started. And then you get that snugged up, not too tight. Before we put everything else on I like to turn the water on, that way you can inspect it for any drips or anything like that, if anything was done incorrectly. I don’t see any drips down here. You know what I’ll probably do is go ahead and just put the handle on there loosely at this point and then go ahead and (water turns on) turn it on. Both hot and cold.
At that point, you’ve verified that there’s no dripping down here, there’s no dripping here. We’ve successfully repaired the faucet here. Now this little trim piece goes on. And we put this back on (the handle), turn it to the hot position, that allows us access to tighten up that set screw. Make sure it’s tight on there and we’re done.
We recommend calling a licensed plumber if you are unable to find any of these parts or if you’re not comfortable following any of these steps.
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Visit us online http://goo.gl/ry00ms or call 206-633-1700.