Personal essays
On fixing a faucet
Noticing the problem
Friday afternoon I got home from a coffee shop. I had been taking a final pass through my book making many more corrections than I’d anticipated.
I really didn’t feel like making dinner and have frankly gotten tired of eating healthy food all the time. I checked a variety of nearby places and rejected them for one reason or another before remembering a sandwich shop I hadn’t been to for ages.
A quick check on my phone was confusing - one app said they closed at 5 and the other said 6.
I called them to see if they were open and was told, “we’re usually open ‘til 6 but we’ve run out of bread and so we’re closing early.”
So I went home and made a salad.
Do I know how to have a good time, or what?
I have a big yellow bowl that I toss the cut vegetables and torn greens into and I toss the peels and other non-edible parts into the sink.
I then pull the faucet out of its handle and spray the sink, directing the discards down the drain towards the disposal.
This time the spray wouldn’t move a leaf. The water was coming out of the faucet but reluctantly.
What was wrong with my water pressure?
Checking around
The first step in addressing a problem, is acknowledging you have one.
Check.
Step two was to see if other neighbors had also noticed a drop in their water pressure - so I sent out a couple of emails.
It’s worth checking to see if the problem was local to me and my house or if the neighbors are having the same problem.
When the lights go off in my house, I always look outside to see if other houses are dark.
Early in our time in our current house, we had to learn not to look across the street. They’re on a different breaker and often our side goes out and theirs doesn’t.
But I digress.
It turns out I could have skipped step two if I’d been more observant.
I’ll spare you the details but while I was waiting to hear from my neighbors, I used the bathroom.
Had I been more observant I would have noticed that the toilet flushed and filled just fine and the water in the bathroom sink was the same as always when I washed my hands.
But, our minds are often elsewhere when we perform these common tasks. What’s interesting is that our mind is paying attention, we’re just not registering it.
The next day, when I heard from the neighbors that their water pressure wasn’t any worse than usual I thought “of course” and remembered what I’d experienced without noticing earlier.
In any case, I’d identified the problem as my kitchen faucet was slow.
“Man Daniel,” you think, “this is not a very exciting story.”
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t get better.
Decisions
I had some options.
Option one was to call a plumber. This would be expensive and it was now a weekend so that would be very expensive.
Option two was to replace the faucet myself. I’d installed this one five years ago and it wasn’t that hard a job. The annoying thing was that the problem was just in the tip at the end. The handles, the connection to the water line, everything else was fine. The problem was just in this little six inch piece at the end.
Hmmm. I wonder if it comes off. I pulled it towards me and unscrewed the faucet end from the hose.
I held the little faucet in my hand and then I made a mistake. I let go of the hose.
It was one of those Wile E Coyote moments where I looked at the hose, realized I’d let it go, and then watched it fall back through the base of the faucet.
Grrrr.
I looked under the sink and saw the weight on the bottom of the hose that I’d installed years before. The weight helps the hose retract so you can put the faucet back on the base.
I looked up how much it would cost to replace the piece in my hand and it was almost as expensive as getting a new faucet.
I’m not very handy but I’m also pretty cheap. Sometimes combine to a situation in which I have to spend more to undo both the problem and the damage I caused trying to fix it.
I decided I’d give it a try and if I messed it up, I’d buy a new faucet.
Research
In the old days I’d go to my Time-Life book on home repair. Now we go to the internet and find an overwhelming number of videos and nothing to really say who can be trusted and who can’t.
The first reliable video I watched said that we could fix the problem by cleaning out the aerator.
Had I been more observant I would have realized this wouldn’t work.
What convinced me that this guy was good was he warned us before we removed the faucet from the hose to hold onto the hose and not let it fall back through the faucet base. Clearly this guy knows what he’s talking about.
I have a faucet with a switch that sets the water to come out like a standard bathroom faucet in one stream or as a spray through a ring of little holes around the edge.
If I’d paid attention to the fact that the pressure was down for both the regular stream and the spray I wouldn’t have bothered with the aerator. But I’ve learned how to unscrew the cover and look inside and the aerator was as clean as can be.
At about this point I realized that fixing a faucet was much like my day job. I go through a lot of these steps as I write code and prose and then go back and write it again.
I threaded the hose back up through the faucet base and turned on the water and it ran through strong enough so the problem was in the faucet end in my other hand.
I looked more closely at the faucet and - I know you see it coming - let go of the hose again and watched it fall back through the faucet base under the sink.
Beep. Beep.
The fix
I watched another video that tackled issues that weren’t the aerator.
It essentially said that if the problem wasn’t at the end where the water came out then it was at the end where the water came in. Oh also, the video told you to make sure you hold onto the hose when you detach it.
So I looked into the end where the hose attaches and sure enough there were some pieces of rubber that seemed to have come off the hose.
I flushed them out, crawled under the sink to thread the hose through the faucet base again, reconnected the faucet and it now runs like new.
I felt an undeserved amount of pride at having fixed the faucet myself instead of calling a plumber even if it required nothing more than unscrewing the hose (don’t forget to hold on to it) and giving it a good rinse.
Had I known what I was doing, the whole process would have taken under five minutes. In the end I had a fixed sink and a visceral metaphor for how I spend so much of my working life.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 154. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe