Changing tap washers

Leaky taps are our bread and butter. Solving a dripping tap is the type of job we love and it’s also one of the most common jobs we do. Most taps still operate on a rubber washer system and changing the washer will 9/10 times solve the leak. All of our handymen carry tap washers with them and it normally only takes 20-30min to change the washers on a set of taps (Providing we can easily turn the water off).

There are some more modern taps that we call quarter turn taps which have replaced rubber washer inserts with something called a ceramic disk. In principal these ceramic disks are meant to last much longer than tap washers which in most cases they do but, and there is a big but, they don’t last forever and when they do eventually go they are far harder to replace than your average tap washer. The action of actually changing them if very straight forward, it is the sourcing of the correct ceramic disk that is the hard part. There are literally 1000’s of different size ceramic valves out there and just going to a local plumbers merchants won’t do the trick any more.

Luckily, here at Silver Saints – London’s premier Handyman Service, we have become specialist at sourcing replacement valves for quarter turn taps. Most other plumbing services would suggest replacing the tap entirely but most times this is not necessary. There are two ways we can solve the drip for you, one way is to send us a picture of the tap via email or mobile phone and we can identify the manufacturers of the tap and get a price on replacement ceramic disks from them (We do this for free) or the other way, if you are not confident taking the pics, is we can send one of our friendly and experienced handymen out to have a look at the tap, see if he can identify it and if he can’t then he will send the details and pics of the tap to us here in the office and we can source the parts. This visit will incur our minimum charge of £40+vat for the first half hour.

Ceramic valves usually cost between £20 and £30 per pair depending on the tap and take about 2-3 days to arrive at our office. Once they are here we will give you a call to book in one of our handymen to fit the replacement disks and presto your leaky tap problems are solved.

Leaky taps is not the only plumbing job we do, we also repair leaking showers, faulty electric showers, plumb in washing machines, dishwashers, repair leaky pipes... the list is endless. Why not visit our website and see if the jobs you need doing are something we can do. I can almost guarantee that they are!