Weird Plumbing

Due to my time working on the beach house, I'm ok doing basic plumbing. I'm not going to rough in a shower or anything, but I can replace a garbage disposal with the best of them. A few months ago, the faucet on our kitchen sink broke. It had sprung a leak and any time you turned it on a lovely mist would spray you. Now, I'm a little taller and thus this mist would hit me in the crotch and make me look as if I had pissed myself. Lucky me. We set out to replace it with a newer, more modern-looking faucet set (the kind that even included the built-in soap dispenser - fancy).

After a longer struggle then it should have been (at no point did the directions include the words: "take out the sawzall", but that's what happened) we got the old faucet off and put the new one in. The problem was that we didn't seem to get as much water pressure with the new faucet set. Didn't notice it at first and, as I've pointed out in this space before, we Rakauskas just roll with stuff so we let it be. But today my father and I decided it was bothering us. So, I climbed under the sink and checked the valves, just to double check that they had been opened all the way. Turns out that they hadn't, only when I opened them up completely, all the water shut off. For some reason we went from weak stream to no stream. Our best guess was that there was a clog in the line and turning the water on full blast had sent it up into the nozzle, blocking it completely. Well, shit. Now we had to get under the sink and fix it.

So, we cleaned out all the crap from the cabinet underneath the sink and took a closer look at the hoses. We couldn't see any visible dings, punctures or crimps. We shut the water off (eventually) and made sure that water was getting to the faucet. It was, so we unhooked it from the intake hose and checked for a blockage. Couldn't see one, so we put it back on. Just for the hell of it, we turned the water back on. Suddenly we had a ton of water pressure coming through the hose. Weird, I know. We didn't do anything other than essentially unplug it and plug it back in, but it was working great. And here all this time I only thought that worked with computers. Unfortunately, this wasn't a long-term solution. I tried the faucet a short time later and we're back to low water pressure.

I guess the moral is this: if you don't really fix something, you shouldn't be surprised when it breaks again.