Plumbing Repairs

Dripping faucets come down to the type of valve inside. A compression faucet drips because the seat washer is worn and the brass seat under it is scored. A cartridge faucet drips because the cartridge is finished. Ceramic disc faucets usually want the disc set or the inlet seals. The parts are cheap. Tracking down the right cartridge for a fifteen-year-old trim set the manufacturer stopped supporting is what takes the time, and sometimes the honest answer is that a new faucet costs less than chasing the part.

A running toilet is nearly always one of two components. The flapper has gone hard, or the seat it lands on is pitted, so water trickles out of the tank into the bowl and the fill valve keeps topping the tank back up. On a metered service you pay for every litre of that. Nothing to hear, nothing to see in the bowl, which is why a silent flapper leak normally gets found on a water bill rather than in a bathroom.

Leaks on pipes and fittings have causes worth knowing. Pinhole leaks in copper are erosion-corrosion, caused by water moving too fast through the pipe, often because the run is undersized or a pressure reducing valve upstream has failed. Yellow brass fittings can dezincify, leaving a pink, chalky, porous fitting that lets go under ordinary pressure. Neither is a one-off.

The first question is whether it is the whole house or one fixture. If it is one tap, the cause is almost always local: a plugged aerator, a partly closed angle stop, a blocked screen inside the cartridge. Those are quick.

Whole-house pressure loss is a different conversation. We put a gauge on an outside tap and read static pressure with nothing running. A low reading points at the pressure reducing valve, a main valve that is not fully open, or the water service itself. A high reading is its own problem, and it surprises people: a failed PRV letting full street pressure into the house is what blows out toilet fills, washing machine hoses and water heater relief valves.

In the older parts of Toronto the answer is often the pipe itself. Galvanized steel supply lines scale shut from the inside over decades, and the restriction is always worst at the threaded fittings. Nothing shows from outside. The pipe looks the same as it did in 1935. What you notice is that the shower dies the moment someone runs the kitchen tap, and that hot is worse than cold. No amount of cleaning fixes that.

Sometimes the right advice is to stop repairing. A third pinhole in the same copper run in two years is not three separate repairs, it is a section of pipe telling you what it plans to do next. Patching galvanized at the leak leaves the rest of the run as restricted as it was. Replacing one brass fitting on a Kitec system leaves every other fitting in place.

We will say so when that is what we are looking at, and give you the scope of the larger job so the comparison is real. Then it is your call. Patching to get through a sale is a legitimate decision and we will do it. What we will not do is take the repair money and stay quiet about the pattern.

It runs the other way too. A twenty-year-old faucet with a cartridge still in production does not need replacing because it is twenty years old.