For a while now, the spare bathroom faucet has been a source of frustration to me. We hardly ever use the shower in that bathroom (I count just four people and one dog), so I was sort of surprised when it started dripping a while back.    Last weekend, I decided that I was sick of the noise and was going to do something about it.

Shower faucets are troublesome to work on in that you don’t usually have access to the back of the unit, nor do they have local shutoffs, so you have to work from the front, with the whole house water off.  To that end, I wasn’t in any hurry to tackle this project; and hey, it only drips a little, right?

I knew from the bezel that the faucet was a Delta Monitor series (though I mistakenly thought it was a ScaldGuard when I got to the hardware store.  I looked through the repair parts for said faucet and found cartridges (about $25) and “repair kits” (partially pictured, about $2.50).  Not really knowing what was wrong, but also not wanting to tear it down twice, I opted for the slightly more expensive (25¢ more) repair kit that included a few extra O-rings (Which, it turns out, are specific to the ScaldGuard and don’t fit our Monitor) along with the standard “springs and cups”.  In case you haven’t caught on, the “cups” are those rubber deals in the photo.  They’re just specialized gaskets.

Anyhow, I switched off the water, drained the system, and disassembled the faucet (mostly per the ScaldGuard instructions; Those two series of Delta faucets seem very similar). I was in a bit of a rush to get the water back on and get on to some other things, so I neglected to take photos. The entire process took about 10 minutes, including time spent gawking at the faucet internals.

When I came back upstairs from turning the water back on, I half expected to find a faucet handle embedded in the shower-wall and a geyser of water shooting out, but it wasn’t to be.  A few cycles of the handle to seat the new gaskets and it hasn’t dripped since.

This is a task that basically anyone with even the slightest bit of mechanical aptitude could do; It doesn’t require any special equipment beyond a small hex key and a large pair of pliers (though the pliers wouldn’t be strictly necessary; The part is supposed to be “hand tight”.) The only potential hangup is getting the springs facing the right direction. The directions on the package are unspecific as to which way the “cone” of the spring faces.  I saw this in advance and just made a note of how the old ones were installed and did the same.

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House, Projects by Kevin