With most homes bought, new owners end up with someone else’s idea of faucet styles and functions. In new homes, the choices look nice. But they tend to be the most basic units the builder can get away with and still sell the home. With a used home, the faucets might have been changed out, but they are used, old, and chosen for someone else’s tastes. Fortunately, homeowners are not stuck with what they end up with. Faucets are easy to swap out, as well as upgrade for better efficiency, performance, and handling.
Design Improvements
The basic faucet involves simple mechanics. With the use of a hand lever that has low or little resistance, the user controls a valve inside the faucet. When open, allows water to flow. The faucet itself is hooked up to one or two water feeds. When dual, one is for cold water and the other is for hot. Some faucets only have one lever but, depending on their position, the temperature can be controlled to cold hot, or in between. Generally, internal faucets for bathrooms and kitchens are dual fed, and outside faucets have a single water feed.
The designs available today range from repositioning the faucet head to different heights to modifying the spray effect from a nozzle instead of a faucet head. They all do the same thing in terms of controlling and delivering water into a sink. But how they do it varies by the hundreds. Kitchen faucets tend to be bigger, designed for a more work-oriented performance with cooking and cleaning in the kitchen. They move more volume of water as well to fill up pots and similar. Bathroom faucets by default are smaller and intended for handwashing. There are also utility sinks in the laundry room or garage, depending on the design of the home and anything added.
What Do New Faucets Offer Besides Looks?
Aside from the benefits of updating your faucets and their looks, new hardware also provides your home with better water efficiency, which in turn reduces your water utility costs. If you’re dealing with hard water, efficiency faucets will reduce the amount of exposure and also reduce the related amount of staining or scaling as a result.
New faucets can dramatically change the overall appearance of a bathroom or kitchen, and multi-function models can upgrade the performance of a faucet from just one type of water delivery to multiple. This is particularly useful in the kitchen where simple water flow makes sense for pot-filling. But a higher-powered spray helps clean and remove food matter down the disposal drain.
Go DIY or Hire a Plumber?
The next decision, of course, involves who is going to do the work installing the new faucet replacement. If you’re not the type who is handy with tools, understands what different wrenches are for, and gets anxious by the idea of being responsible for connecting water feed lines, then it’s a smart decision to let a licensed plumber handle the faucet replacement. Even DIY experts run into problems that are a snap for a plumber. That’s because daily experience gives a plumber an edge on how to deal with problems. A common issue, for example, is matching new hardware with older plumbing. This is a very real issue in older homes. An experienced plumber knows and expects these issues coming into the job. But a DIY may be caught by surprise and then not know what to do for modifications to bridge the connections properly.
Additionally, anything having to do with house plumbing always has a risk of leaking if not repaired properly. And leaking water can cause a lot of damage quickly, especially from a water feed. With a licensed plumber, the work is done right, and, if there is a mistake. The plumber has the responsibility to fix it, not the homeowner. That kind of protection can’t be bought for a DIY project.
Take advantage of the new designs available for a faucet upgrade. But have the work addressed by a professional plumber. You will be happier more often than not with the results.