How to Repair Old Kitchen Faucets That Leak

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Tim Gipson, I'm going to talk to you about how to repair old kitchen faucets that may leak. Now, in repairing a leaky faucet you really need to look and determine where it is. So if it's up here in the neck then it probably has something to do with the cartridge or the washer mechanism inside the handle. Another thing is if you have this type of faucet that has the sprayer as part of the faucet you might just want to check your connections to the hose of the faucet and make sure that it's nice and tight. So once you do that and you really don't have any problems, then some of the tools we're going to need to actually check this out and fix this will be a set of Allen wrenches because that's what loosens the set screws. You'll need a crescent wrench, and perhaps a Phillips head and flathead screwdriver. You may not necessarily use them but it's a good idea to go ahead and have your tools ready to go. So the first thing that we want to do is we want to be able to loosen this set screw in here. So we can pop our handle off. And once we do that, typically there will be some kind of a retaining ring, just a decorative cover that you can turn off and now we've got the inside of our faucet. So once we've got everything exposed now before we do anything if we can identify that that's where the leak is, the next thing we'll want to do is that we'll want to if we're going to change anything we want to make sure we turn off the water. Now if the first thing we might want to try to do is if it's leaking a little bit and usually it's a cartridge is just give it a little bit of a turn and see if turning it and seating it will make that leak go off. So if that cuts the leak off, you're good to go, you can put everything back together. But now if we determine that we've got some bad washers in here or we need to remove this, then what we're going to do is we're going to turn off the water and we're going to open the faucet up to relieve any pressure on the system, and then we can remove the cartridge assembly and either replace the whole cartridge or replace the washers that are in there. And with - if you can look and you know the type of faucet that you have, then either your replace cartridges or replacement washers can be bought in a kit at any hardware store or home improvement store. I'm Tim Gipson and that's how to fix an old leaky faucet."