A new cartridge in a single lever basin mixer tap.
The photograph is the tap and its part side by side: a chrome single lever mixer on a white basin, with a speckled grey granite worktop and pale wall tiles behind, and next to it the green Hansgrohe box the new cartridge came in.
The cartridge
A single lever tap does two jobs with one handle.
Lifting the lever gives more water, and swinging it moves the mix between hot and cold. All of that happens in the cartridge, a small unit inside the body of the tap, where two ceramic discs slide over each other.
When a mixer drips at the spout, or the lever goes stiff and hard to move, it is usually the cartridge, worn or scaled up, and the cartridge is what gets changed.
There is no washer to change in a tap like this.
The change
A cartridge change is done with the tap left where it is, on the basin. The supply to the tap is isolated and the tap opened to let the pressure off. The lever comes off, then the cover over the body, and that leaves the old cartridge in the body, held down by a nut. The nut and the cartridge come out, and the seat it sat in is cleaned, because a new cartridge seated on scale or grit can weep. The new one has to be made for the tap, not a near enough fit, which is why this one came boxed by Hansgrohe. It goes in the right way round, so the hot and the cold come on where they always did, and is tightened down firm. Then the cover and the lever go back on, the water goes back on, and the tap is run through its whole travel, full hot to full cold, with an eye on the spout for drips and a look under the basin for any wet.
The tap stays the same tap. Only the part inside it is new.
Small basin jobs
Our bathroom page covers the bigger work of refits, shower rooms, toilets and tiling, and a tap cartridge is about as small as a bathroom job gets.
A whole new tap is a different job, like the new pair in our bath tap replacement. Wet under the basin and not at the spout is more likely a joint, a hose or the waste, as in our post on a flexi pipe leaking under the sink.
Ring 07546 185778 and say what the tap is doing, dripping or stiff, and send a photograph of it if you can.
