dnoyeb's Journal: Fawcets clogged

This is my water system rant.

So since Christmas the shower pressure has been getting slower and slower. Randomly. So the other day my wife goes to take a shower and nothing comes out. Plus the sink is dripping slowly too. I'm upset that the pressure is low and im ready to storm the water board building. Then I hear her running the bath. Its next to the shower. At full pressure...So it hits me that this is a fawcet problem and not the pressure.

So off to the hardware store I go. Completely rebuild the knob assemblies. That is, I scrub it with CLR type stuff, and change the washers and repack them both. Turn on the water...nothing. So I assume that the rubber has deterioriated and been pushed up into the shower head and it blocking it. (this would turn out to be close to the truth) So off with the head, and I see no black rubber, but a bunch of white stuff. So all the fawcet work for nothing because its this white stuff.

So I clear the sink nozzle too of the white stuff. Pressure has not bee this high is ages! 2 weeks later back to dripping. Clean. 2 days later back to dripping. clean. Now every day the sinks get clogged with this white stuff.

Back to the 'storm the water department' idea. But I was deferred to the water quality department, where the man told me that between about 1986 and 1989 certain hot water tanks had a poor quality. The dipstick which is white plastic will eventually deteriorate. So that is what I have in my nozzles.

He's going to send me directions on what to do about it.

I love experienced people. Their is nothing like *people*. Stupid computer answering machines can never provide this level of experience and diagnosis. It took all of 2 minutes on the phone to diagnose this mess. Thats why i always go to the local hardware store and not HomeDepot when possible.

Imagine if this were actually software related I would probably get a ceast and desist from the vendor...And the water board man probably would have been under gag order.

Anyway, hope you dont have such a hot water heater, but if you do, you be banging your head on the wall wondering where you read about such a store :D But subconsciously you will know the solution to the problem anyway ;)