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Posted by on April 18, 2008, 10:21 pm
> My kitchen faucet does the drip, drip drip thing.
>
> I shut off the water at the cold water shutoff, remove the stem from the
> hot water valve at the kitchen sink and see one, two or three tiny
> grains of sand, flaked iron, who knows what it is, but it's very tiny.
> The stem is part of a new faucet I bought for the kitchen sink, around a
> year ago, and it's the old fashioned rubber washer kind, not ceramic. I
> brush off the "grains" with an old tooth brush and put the stem back
> together, open the water and no more drip, drip drip. I never get this
> with the cold water stem.
>
> Problem is, I have to do this again every few days, maybe not for 10
> days if I'm lucky. Unless I want to live with the drip, drip drip (and I
> don't).
>
> I had my water service replaced around a year ago, being the line that
> transmits cold water from the meter at the curb to where it attaches to
> the house service, a stretch of maybe 60 feet. This was necessitated
> because the plumbers who did a trenchless sewer line replacement found
> the water service in bad shape, bad enough where it sprung a pretty bad
> leak. They may have caused that leak but they wouldn't fix it for free
> or even a reduced rate, claiming that it was so old and in such bad
> condition (galvanized pipe), that it simply needed replacement. So, I
> paid them to do it because their bid was actually pretty good ($2200,
> IIRC).
>
> My tank water heater (40 gallon) was replaced by an on demand Noritz
> system (free, because I qualified for a city program, and this was their
> first foray into tankless, and I was a willing participant). I don't
> really care for the tankless, but that's off topic.
>
> They put in some copper pipe from the tankless heater, but the line that
> goes from there to my kitchen sink is around 30-40 feet of no-doubt old
> galvanized pipe, and giving off sediment, presumably the rusting innards
> of the pipe. I reasoned that this is what's causing the tiny particles
> on the rubber stem washer problem and thought I'd measure, buy the 30-40
> feet of galvanized pipe that would be needed to replace what's there now
> and do it myself, now that the weather has warmed up.
>
> But I got to thinking... what if this is caused by something else? All
> that work and the expense of the new pipe would have been for nothing.
> So I decided to post here first. Can I "safely" assume that replacing
> that pipe would fix this problem? I have pipe wrenches, a hack saw, even
> a jigsaw with metal blades. I have a propane (and Mapp Gas) torch, too,
> but I have never sweated copper pipe, but figure if I just replace the
> old galvanized with galvanized, I won't need to do that. I don't intend
> to live here indefinitely. I'll be looking to sell the house and find
> one that suits me better. Thanks for your input/ideas, etc.
>
> Dan
I'm concerned that the copper and galvanized pipe are in the same
system. If these two metals are in direct contact, they set up
galvanic corrosion which is supposed to lead to failure of the
galvanized pipe. At least, that's how I recall the situation. They
make special fittings to isolate the two metals, just for this reason.
I have no idea if that is related to your problem, though.
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