Daily Home Renovation Tips

Seriously, what do you think that little cartridge I have resting on my home office table is actually called or what it does?

Nothing like a good home maintenance trivia question to start the day, right?

If you answered “Why a Moen 1224B Cartridge for two-handle faucets of course.”, you would be incorrect.

If you answered ”A Moen 1224B Cartridge for two-handle faucets which malfunctioned to cause a hot water drip which could not be stopped on New Year’s day within your Moen laundry faucet.”, you would be correct.

We wrote a few days ago about the heating element in our five year old Whirlpool Duet dryer stopping to work on Christmas Eve. This time, it was New Years Eve when Cath was using the faucet in our laundry room. A few minutes later she came to me and said that she could not turn off the hot water.

Neither could I.

I’m thinking of not recognizing ‘eve’ type of days any more.

Not being a plumber by trade or having much plumbing experience, a few thoughts when through my mind. The first one was to use the hot water shut off valved underneath the sink so we would not be wasting not only clean water (which is rapidly becoming a scarce resource) but heated water at that (to cost me money to heat the water which was simply going down the drain).

When I looked under the sink, I see that the contractor we had installed the laundry room sink the easy way (for him), that being with no shut off for the hot or cold lines for the laundry room sink’s faucet.

Ugh.

I spent a good 30 minutes in the basement (as the laundry room is on the main floor of our home) but could not find the shut off valves for the faucet. This meant that the only way to turn the water off at the faucet was to turn of the water for the entire house.

After playing with the faucet, I was able to get the leak down to a slow drip, as shown in the above picture of the faucet leak and as show in the picture below:

Now, the faucet itself is not expensive. We purchased it at Home Depot a couple of years ago and what do you know but I was able to find it again. It currently retails for around $55.

I performed some Internet searches and  found some chat forums  and learned two things. First, apparently it is not uncommon for this situation to occur and when it does it seemed that most of the times it was with the hot, not the cold, water.

Second, a few of the forum members tried to describe that it was possible purchase a part which resides within the hot water handle, take the handle apart, install the new part, put the handle back together again and the leak would be stopped.

For $55, I have to be honest. Why not just buy the same or similar model and replace the whole darn thing? As I am not, as mentioned, a plumber, I had visions of water spewing out all over the place after my feeble attempt to take apart and put back together again the hot water handle. Yikes!

A trip to Home Dept was in store for the next day.

What I learned surprised me and may surprise you.

To continue to the next article in this series, simply select this link to Moen Laudry Faucet Leak Repair.