Daughter's faucet fix makes dad proud papa

MAlan Miller

y eldest daughter sent me the most beautiful video. It was no more than a few seconds shot with her phone, but it was one of those clips that stops a dad in his tracks.

It was water flowing from an outdoor spigot.

A few days earlier, she had called me to say that the spigot was a mess. The plastic handle had shattered, and the spigot was leaking uncontrollably.

Actually, it was flowing freely, and if not for the hose attached to it, the water would have been running for a solid week while she and her husband were on vacation with us.

Their house is about 30 years old, which means that the outdoor faucet has been turned on and off thousands of times, and it was worn out.

This spigot is one of the frost-free varieties. Having replaced two of them over the years, I can tell you that they are among the many engineering marvels that I greatly appreciate but do not fully comprehend, such as Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge.

I’m sure that many of you have these valves in your homes. They are the oddlooking outdoor faucets with bulbous humps on their backs.

Hidden in the wall behind the faucet is a pipe that varies in length depending on the thickness of your wall. The pipe contains a rod attached to the handle. And at the opposite end of the rod is the working end of the valve.

That end, safely inside