- Drip, drip, drip. Few sounds are more annoying to hear at night than the steady drip of a leaky faucet. It makes you want to take a pipe wrench and destroy the leaky faucet---and you would, except your leak would turn into a midnight fountain show in your kitchen. Take heart. You can remedy the problem without destroying your faucet or even hiring a plumber. Read how faucets being to leak, and you may not have to put up with that steady midnight dripping again.
- The faucet is at the end of a water cycle that runs through your house. Whenever you turn that faucet on, you are releasing pressure from the major pipes in your house. Half of that water probably passed through a water heater tank. All of the water came through pipes attached to a larger pipe somewhere in your town or city. That water either came straight from a well in the ground or a treatment plant that has millions of gallons passing through it. As you can see, that's a lot of water going to your faucet!
- Your faucet has a little rubber stopper ring inside it between the head and the main faucet neck, often referred to as a gasket or O-ring. The gasket is supposed to hold back all that well-traveled water from leaking when your faucet is in the "off" position. Think about all that water pressure and the distance the water travels before it reaches your faucet---that's a lot for a little gasket to take! Anything under pressure looks for the weakest point to escape. Over time, the gasket can break down and become that weak point. Or, if you have water that isn't properly filtered or contains a lot of sediments, the gasket can start to rot away.
- Fortunately, the fix is often pretty simple. With small tools and a replacement gasket, you can fix that leak in a matter of minutes. Turn off the water pressure to the faucet, remove the head and replace the faulty gasket with a new one. (See the resource listed below for specifics.) This can lead to a less expensive water bill and, more importantly, a better night's sleep.
