Daily Home Renovation Tips

Yesterday, I wrote about my experiences at our local Home Depot and the no cost solution provided by the sales associate to me for our Moen laundry faucet hot water leak, that being to replace the cartridge which resides within the hot water handle with a new cartridge (provided to me at no cost) rather than removing the entire faucet and replacing it with another one.

The dripping hot water from the faucet is not helping my energy savings efforts; it must be stopped.

Using the instructions provided in the package containing the replacement cartridge, here are the steps I performed.

First, to turn of the the water before disassembling the faucet handle. As mentioned earlier, this sink did not have a water shut off for the faucet, so I had to turn off the water to the entire house from the main line in the basement.

Next, turn on both the hot and cold water to ensure that you actually did shut off the water!

Next, what I should have done and what you should also do before you start is to put the stopper in the sink’s drain. This was not written on the instructions and I did not do this until I almost lost one of the hot water handle’s parts literally down the drain!

Next, take the utility knife and carefully remove the handle cover on top of the hot water handle.

It does not matter for this particular faucet if you do this on the outside or inside of the red ring in the above picture. Just be careful to not scratch the surface. If you have a sharp flat screwdriver with a thin head you could try this instead of the utility knife.

Next, using a Phillips screwdriver, unscrew (counter clockwise) the screw which is holding down the hot water handle to the faucet, as shown in the above picture.

Once the screw is removed from the handle, the handle cover itself simply comes right off by lifting it up.

Once the handle is removed, you can see both the top of the defective cartridge as well as the large cartridge nut. To remove the cartridge nut, I used the wrench again going counter clockwise. After about a full turn or so using the wrench, I was able to simply turn the cartridge nut with my fingers the rest of the way.

The next task was to remove the defective cartridge. For this task, I needed the pair of pliers you see in the picture below.

It does lift straight up but because of the cartridge’s shape, I was not able to grasp it sufficiently tightly with my fingers, hence the use of the pliers.

OK, now what? Well, the remaining set of steps is not simply to reverse the above tasks. Almost, but not quite.

Select the following link to go through the steps to replace the now removed defective cartridge with its replacement.