Your Outdoor Faucet Is Dripping - Don't Replace It

Your outdoor faucet is dripping, and the man you call is going to quote you a new one. He is not cheating you. There is a hundred and fifty dollars on his ticket before he takes his hand off your door, and nobody drives across town for a ten cent part. Four times out of five, a ten cent part is all that failed. I spent forty years as head custodian at one public school. Four hose bibs on that building, one on each wall, opened every spring and shut down every fall. Same four handles, forty times each. You stop guessing after that. Here is what is in this one. Water running down your arm at the handle is not the same failure as water dripping off the spout, and the two are fixed in completely different places. One of them is a quarter turn with a wrench and does not even need the water shut off. Why cranking the handle harder makes the drip permanent instead of stopping it, and what it does to the brass underneath. That little cap sitting on top of your spigot, the one that sprays sideways at you. It is not broken and it is not a leak. It is the reason lawn chemicals cannot get into your kitchen tap, it costs four dollars to fix, and I will tell you plainly not to take it off. The habit that kills the washer, splits the hose and empties your wallet slowly, which I had backwards for twenty years and so did the man who trained me. And the last one, which is the reason there was an inch of water on my boiler room floor one April morning. That faucet had been perfectly dry all winter and it was already broken, and it will not show you a single sign until the day you open it in the spring. That last one is the only thing on this list I am telling you not to fix yourself. I was never a licensed plumber and I never said I was. I was one man with four spigots and no budget, and that teaches you which parts are cheap. #HomeMaintenance #OutdoorFaucet #janitor