LESLIE: Brad in Virginia, you’re up next. How can we help you?
BRAD: It’s a water situation in my house.
TOM: OK.
BRAD: In one bathroom, you’ve got cold and hot. You go to the kitchen, you’ve got hot and barely is running cold. And then the last bathroom, it’s the same way.
TOM: OK. So, you have a good stream of hot and cold water in the one bathroom but you don’t have it in the other two?
BRAD: Right.
TOM: So, to me, that sounds like it’s a valve problem. Because the first thing you want to ask yourself is whether or not you have enough water pressure coming into the house. And if you’ve got it in one bathroom, then you certainly do. You just don’t have it in these other two and got to figure out why that is. It could be a partially obstructed valve; it might look like it’s open but it’s partially closed. It could be a clogged aerator but that would affect both hot and cold equally. You could easily check that, by the way, just by unscrewing the aerator. That’s that little tip of a faucet where the water comes out.
LESLIE: Just make sure you remember how you took it apart, because it goes back in that opposite way.
TOM: Yeah. It’s like – it’s kind of like Rubik’s Cube sometimes trying to get it back together again. But the fact that you have water that’s the correct pressure in one bathroom means it’s not a water-pressure problem. It’s definitely going to be in the plumbing or in the valves or the fixtures or faucets themselves, which is another thing, by the way. The plumbing faucet itself could be a problem.
The other thing that you could do is you could disconnect the plumbing, you know, at the valve and just hook up some hose lines to it there. And just see how much water pressure comes out. See if you can sort of narrow down where the restriction is. Is it the faucet? Is it the valve? Where exactly is it being restricted? Is it before it gets to that fixture or faucet? Because you do have the water pressure; you’ve proven that. OK?
BRAD: Yeah, OK. Thanks.
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