When the plumbing goes wrong in your home, it can cost a fortune if you have to call out a professional to fix it, and even the smallest of problems may end up costing you a lot of money. For this reason, being able to fix things yourself can help save a bit of cash.
One issue that almost everyone faces at some point is a loose kitchen faucet. This may be an annoyance at first, but it can also damage the lines if it gets worse, so it needs to be repaired as soon as possible. And if you want to have a go, here’s how to tighten a kitchen faucet.
Tightening a kitchen faucet base is an easy job because all you need to do is tighten a nut. The main difficulty comes in accessing that nut since it will be located under the sink.
Evil Monobloc Tap Nut!!
Once you gain access to the nut, it’s just a simple case of tightening it to fix the faucet base securely in place.
Here are the steps you need to follow to tighten a loose faucet base. Before reading on, you can check out this video for a preview of what you should be doing.
In most homes, the space under the sink is used as a place to store all manner of cleaning products and other items. If this is the case in your home too, you will need to move them out of the way to gain access to underneath your sink.
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Before you start looking for the nut that you will need to tighten, you should turn off the two water valves located under the sink.
While this might not be absolutely necessary, it’s good practice since it will stop you getting soaked if the pipe bursts or anything else goes wrong while you are tightening the nut.
Next, take the flashlight and slide under the sink on your back. With the flashlight, you need to locate the nut that secures the faucet in place.
How To Tighten The Nut Under The Kitchen Sink Faucet
If you are using an adjustable wrench, set it to the correct size for the nut that holds the faucet in place.
Tighten the nut by turning it in a clockwise direction with your wrench. Depending on your sink, you may find you have to twist yourself into some unnatural positions to reach it, but other than this, you shouldn’t have any problems.
Come back out from under the sink and physically check that the faucet base has been successfully tightened and no longer moves around.
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If the faucet is now secure, you can turn the valves back on under the sink and replace everything you had to move out of the way. The job is done.
Tightening a loose faucet handle is another simple job. However, there are many different types of faucet, including pull-out kitchen faucets, and commercial kitchen faucets or even touchless kitchen faucets.
As before, this might not be necessary, but it’s always good practice since it will avoid causing a flood if anything should break or otherwise go wrong.
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However, if you need to work with the faucet open, this will prevent water from coming out when you move it to the “on” position, so you should always start by closing the valves.
If you can’t find this, you need to pop off the decorative cap in the handle. To do this, use the flathead screwdriver (or knife). Once you have removed the cap, look inside. You will see either a hex head set screw or a Phillips head screw.
If you have a model with a set screw at the base of the handle, take the hex head wrench (Allen key), push it into the screw and turn clockwise to tighten.
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You might not be able to do this with the faucet in the “off” position and may need to turn it to “on”. This is the main reason we closed the water valves before we started.
If the screw is located under a decorative cap, use the hex head wrench or Phillips head screwdriver as necessary to tighten the screw by turning it clockwise. You may need to hold the faucet handle as you do this.
Once everything is done, physically check the faucet handle to make sure it no longer moves. If it is now fixed firmly in place, you are ready to put everything back how it was.
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Once the handle is securely fastened, pop the decorative cap back in place if necessary, open the valves under the sink – and the job is complete.
As you can see, tightening a kitchen faucet is an easy job just about anyone can do. As long as you have a few basic tools and a minimum of DIY sense, you can save money by following our guide and taking care of the problem yourself. You’re welcome!To change a kitchen tap, you need to turn off the water supply, disconnect the two hot and cold pipes, remove the tap from the kitchen sink via the nuts, and refit everything in reverse order.
I have been plumbing and replacing taps for over ten years, and I can tell you first-hand that replacing a kitchen tap can be a walk in the park, or make me want to quit plumbing.
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I can be in and out in 20 minutes and feel like a plumbing god, but sometimes it takes a few hours and makes me feel like plumbing isn’t for me. Every situation and setup is different.
Here I’ll give you my best advice to teach you how to change a kitchen tap based on my trial and error experience over the years.
The kitchen tap tools needed to replace a kitchen tap can vary, but here are my recommendations for most kitchen taps with links to my best tools on Amazon:
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Most kitchen taps have a horseshoe-type bracket to hold the tap to the kitchen sink. These horseshoe brackets are held with threaded rods and one or two small nuts.
This is the same as changing basin taps, kitchen taps and single lever basin taps, they are all virtually the same underneath.
You will need to cut the copper pipes with a 15mm pipe cutter and fit some isolating valves to the copper pipes, then you can fit the new flexible tap connectors to the new isolating valves after removing the top nuts.
Kitchen Sink Mixer Tap Twin Lever Black Stylish 1/2 Bsp Easy Fix Deck Modern
To change a kitchen tap cartridge and fix a dripping tap, you need to remove the tap handle (usually with a 2.5mm hex key), and then remove the cartridge with an adjustable spanner.
Make sure you turn the water supply off first and make sure to tighten the nuts up securely as you don’t want the tap coming loose after a few uses.
What size box spanner you need for kitchen taps depends on the tap. There is no standard size for the nuts on kitchen taps. You need to buy a set of box spanners, which typically come in 9 – 13mm sizes.
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You will need certain plumbing tools to change your kitchen tap but if you feel competent enough and follow the instructions properly then you can definitely do it yourself.
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