Attempt to fix faucet has happy ending

Alittle time off during the holidays turned into a party with the plumbing at the Miller house.

Those shower faucets I mentioned last month — the two taunting me with their drip, drip, dripping — did not heal themselves, so I took the challenge and tore into them.

Both are somewhat complicated single-handle faucets that allow us to set the temperature with a dial on the faucet and then simply turn on the one faucet to set the volume of water it delivers.

The only problem was that both of the Delta faucets were delivering a consistent drip of water every few minutes even when the faucet was off.

The United States Geological Survey offers an online calculator to help us determine how much water we’re wasting with a leaking faucet (https://water.usgs.gov/ edu/activity-drip.html). In my case, the calculator says that two faucets producing one drop each minute will result in 2,880 drips a day, which amounts to 69 gallons a year.

That sobering thought, plus the fact that the dripping was simply annoying, helped inspire the courage I needed to take apart the first faucet. Using my ever-present cellphone, I took photos during the process so that I would remember how to put it back together.

I started by turning off the water to the house.

Required tools were minimal: an Allen wrench, a Phillips screwdriver and a “strap” wrench, which is pretty much what it sounds like: a wrench made of a handle and a strap of rubber or rubberized, industrialstrength fabric.

(That wrench is used to remove and re-install the threaded housing that holds the guts of the faucet in place. It applies even pressure around the outside of the housing, compared to traditional

channel-lock pliers or pipe wrenches, which apply pressure unevenly and could disfigure and damage the housing, rendering it useless.)

Inside the faucet, I found the most unusual “washers” I have ever seen. The two washers are blue silicon, about the size of a 50-cent piece with unusual shaped holes for the water to flow through. I had more traditional button-size washers on hand, but nothing like those alien washers for replacements.

So I cleaned up the old ones, flipped them over so that the worn side wasn’t doing all the work any longer,

put the faucet back together and prayed that it wouldn’t leak. And for more than a week, it has been holding tight.

(I took photos of the two washers so that I can order replacements from Delta in anticipation of the next time they leak.)

That job took about an hour and a half, including about a half-hour of head-scratching and sweating.

The second faucet took less than an hour, in part because I had a little experience under my belt, and also because its working parts pivot on the more traditional

button-style washers that sit on squat little springs to hold them tightly in place. Those replacement parts are cheap and readily available, and I had a set on hand.

With a boost of confidence and a little extra time on my hands, I replaced a washer in the kitchen sink faucet.

And to celebrate those successes, I gave the basement workshop its annual cleaning.

Party on!

Alan D. Miller is a Dispatch editor who writes about old-house repair and historic preservation. amiller@dispatch.com @youroldhouse