New taps on a bath, a pair for a pair.
The first photograph is the after. Two new chrome pillar taps, one at each side of the tap end, the hot on the left with its red disc on top and the cold on the right with its blue disc, against the same blue mosaic tiles as before. The second photograph is the same end of the bath with the old pair still on it: chrome cross heads, and on the left one the little cap that says hot or cold is missing from the top.
Pillar taps
A pillar tap is a tap on its own, one for the hot and one for the cold, each standing up through its own hole in the bath.
That is what this bath has, two at the tap end, and the new pair stand in the same two places the old pair stood. The bath is the same bath in both photographs, and the tiles behind it are the same tiles. It is the plainest kind of bath tap replacement there is. The other common route is a mixer, one tap across both holes with a single spout, and that is the one people mean when they search for replacing bath taps with a mixer. Here it was a pair for a pair.
Under the tap end
The question people type is whether you can change bath taps without removing the bath, and on a bath like this the answer is yes. The bath stays where it is. All of the work is underneath the tap end, where each tap is held to the bath by a nut from below and joined to its own supply pipe, and that is the awkward corner of any bath, tight against two walls with the panel in the way. So the job starts with the panel. The supplies are isolated, the connections under each tap are undone, the nuts come off and the old taps lift out from above. The new ones go in on their washers, tightened up from underneath so they sit firm and do not turn in the hole, and the supplies are joined back on. Then both taps are run, hot and cold, with the panel still off and a torch on every joint underneath, because a joint under a bath that weeps is a joint nobody sees until it shows up somewhere else. Only when everything under there is dry does the panel go back on.
The smaller jobs
Our bathroom page says not everything is a full refit, and a pair of bath taps is about as small as a bathroom job gets. When it is the bath that needs changing, the tiles usually come into it as well, which is the bath replacement we wrote up before.
Ring 07546 185778 and say what the taps are doing, and send a photograph of them if you can.
