A leaky faucet is nothing but money down the drain.
Nothing is worse than throwing money down the drain. If you have a leaky faucet, then you are doing just that. Every house has a list of things that needs to be done. More often than not there are some pretty big projects on that list. As we try to figure out how to get to the hard and expensive stuff, we tend to forget about the easy stuff.
Every house has that one loose doorknob that takes months to get to until it just finally drives someone nuts. It takes 2 minutes to fix but it is low priority, so you put it in the back of your mind saying you will get to that eventually.
One of the things that people say they will get to eventually is that leaky faucet. It is only a drop here and a drop there. How bad can it be? Well, it could be bad.
A leaky faucet, on average cost people about $100 dollars a year. What can you do with $100? Quite a bit if it wasn’t literally going down the drain. Besides the cost of the water itself, water is also pretty corrosive. Over time, the spot where the water is dripping can actually wear away and become discolored. On some surfaces, you may be looking at mold and mildew. All of these things just lead to more costs and more money spent on something that could have been avoided in the first place.
An Exploded View of a Faucet
Unfortunately, these water leaks aren’t as easy to fix as a loose doorknob. While the problem may be something as simple as a worn out washer, or gasket, it could mean that you will need to turn off the water to the area and disassemble the fixture. If you dive into that project, the best thing to do is take pictures of every piece on your cell phone before removing them. This way when you go to put the fixture back together, you have a good record of what it looked like in each stage whole taking it apart. Another thing you could do is look for the documentation that came with the faucet if you still have it. If not, you can probably find it online. Most documentation showed an exploded view of the fixture and all of its parts in the order it is placed in the fixture. As you remove each part, place it on the picture to keep all of the parts in order. With these two tips, you ensure that you don’t lose any pieces and you don’t get stuck not remembering how to put all of those small pieces back together.
If you get stuck, or you don’t want to take the chance of turning a minor annoyance into a huge headache, call BBC Mechanical. We’ll get you through your problem and you can save the money instead of watching it go down the drain.