New Monitor

That's what the guy at McGuckin's called it at least. And, no, I'm not talking about the thing you look at with your CPU. I thought it was called a cartridge, or, in the simplest of terms the guts of our bath tub faucet. Our bathtub has been leaking for quite a while and I have been scared to try to tackle that task. Thankfully, Ed-the-man-who-is-not-afraid-to-tackle-anything is here so we started looking into the problem Saturday.

At first we took things apart upstairs and stared at it for a while. After we were through staring at it, we decided we should go turn off the water and start whacking it with a hammer. As it turns out, we don't have any shutoff valves other than our main shutoff to the entire house! Great! Since this was Saturday evening and some of the women in the house like to take showers in the morning before church (what-Ev-uh!) we decided we better do a little more research before turning off all the water in the house, walloping the faucet for a while then possibly having to pay for emergency plumber service.

We found the model and installation instructions on the web along with tips for fixing leaks. You can find anything on the web! This story is taking longer than I thought to tell and I can't seem to remember how things played out.

Where was I? At one point, we thought we needed a plumber because we thought we needed to replace the entire unit and the current unit is cold-fused into place. Remember my story about flux, solder, and copper tubing? I figured I'd just pay a plumber to do it this time since it was in much tighter confinements. I think this is when we found the instructions on the web about how to fix a leak, so we went to Home Depot to get the cartridge and they did not have any (or at least anyone who was intelligent enough to help us find the part). We almost just bought a new faucet kit, but the only one they had was already opened and picked at so I opted not to get it.

We put the faucet back together as best we could for the night. Now it was a continuous running stream of water, not just a small leak. Ha!

During the "research" on Saturday, we determined that our next door neighbor is a plumber. I sucked up the courage to go talk to him to see if he wanted to do some after hours work. Apparently, he was too engrossed in his afternoon TV watching (etc.) to be much help, but said he had just replaced his cartridge and that fixed his leak. He said it just slid out and you slide a new one into place. So, back to the web, called McGuckin's, got the piece, shut off all the water, 10 minutes later it was fixed! YEAH!

I also got 2 shutoff valves I want to install in my crawl space so I can more selectively shut off the water in my house. Ed thinks it would be a "fun" project for me and my dad to do when he gets here. I got the compression shutoff valves so I would not have to mess with the flux/solder again. It should be easy, but you never know with water pipes. Leaks happen SO easily.