Kitchen Faucet Update

I called the landlady yesterday about 4:30, told her what was going on and that there was no hurry.  Since the plumber is double time over the weekend, she’ll call them Monday to have it checked out.

Meanwhile, I tried turning the two valves under the sink all the way off and all the way on again.  Factoid one is that one side never stopped all water flow completely, even shut all the way.  The other side seemed grudging.  They were opened up fully, as far as I could tell, and I turned them wide open when I was done, to no avail.  Factoid two is that with the water running out the faucet, for the current tricklesome values of “running,” turning on the sprayer also resulted in a mere dribble.  That tells me the blockage is not merely calcification of the faucet tip.  That also tells me the blockage is not in the faucet’s valve, but instead is before the water ever gets there.  Factoid three is that I left the water running all the way on hot for quite a while earlier, while I washed a few things, and at one point the water suddenly flowed at a near normal rate.  The hot has never blasted out of the faucet, so it may have even been completely normal.  Sadly, I switched it over to cold to see if that was back, which it wasn’t, and when I moved it back to hot, it was back to a trickle, never to recover in the few more minutes it ran.

So what does that all mean?  Especially that last item?  Odd.  Almost as if something dislodged or melted or something.

I haven’t checked for any valve problems in the cellar, in part because I am assuming that there’s one master shutoff to the entire apartment.  Could be a poor assumption, but we’ll see.  We also have not run the dishwasher, which hooks in below the sink shutoff valves and has its own shutoff, lever style.  If the water seems to flow full force into the dishwasher, that will pinpoint further.

And you know, I need to look at it again.  The hot and cold have to mix and be controlled by the faucet valve before flowing through the spray hose.  It affects both.  It has to be at that point.  See, sometimes this is a good reason for writing something into a blog post…

1. Luckily for us the cold water faucet at the kitchen sink started flowing at the nomal pressure the other day. Had it continued, I would have taken the feed line off the shut off valve and checked for any crap in the line. The same thing happened to the downstairs toilet when the main water line was replaced. I took the rubber hose off because the tank wasn’t refilling and found some junk blocking the line. After I cleaned it out, I opened the valve to test it and forgot how good the water pressure was.

   Posted by Sharon  on  01/08  at  10:31 AM

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