Big Pair of Brass Ones

It’s 7:20 on a weekend.

I’m coming home with the kids – about to reach the house door when I hear it:  
Bddddt! Bddddt! Bddddt! Bddddt!

I’m like WTF is that?

I’m standing in the garage, the kids are coming up behind me and the noise is pulsing, but constant. Sounds like a machine that’s straining to do something and failing.

Bddddt! Bddddt! Bddddt! Bddddt!

I open the door thinking something’s wrong with the dishwasher, ’s the beater arm stuck?

No. Dishwasher’s off. Sounds coming from the right and-

-there’s water on the hall floor, right in front of the bathroom. Water flowing out of the bathroom.

Damn.

I scramble into the bathroom door and see a geyser of water shooting out of where the faucet’s cold water shutoff used to be. It’s spraying easily 7 feet into the air and the walls have water stains on them. There’s standing water on the bathroom’s tile floor and on my hardwood floor in the hallway.

Damn. Damn. Damn.

I fling open the vanity doors under the sink and go for the shutoff valves. I’m congratulating myself on having the valves installed a year ago (for reasons beyond my understanding all three bathrooms had no local shutoffs – I could not see that as a good thing long term, so we paid a plumber to put in shutoffs when he put in our new faucets).

Two cranks on the cold side’s valve and the water stops. We go from a thundering geyser to silence punctuated by steady dripping sounds.

Dripping down.

I go down the basement stairs and see water dripping through the ceiling tiles. The basement ceiling seems to be snakebit when it comes to water.  Remembering how I’d managed to spray water over them two years ago -  I’m like: here we go again.

I walk across the sponge-like carpeting and go into the finished half of the basement. Water is dripping through the light fixture nearest me and the floor is totally soaked.

I tell the kids to stay upstairs and I begin flinging the sodden mass of stuffed animals and pillows into the uncarpeted side of the basement.

Damn.

The downstairs ceiling is not merely wet, it’s soaked. The ceiling fixture is now an inverted fountain, and our laundry pile is now a sponge. I call E and ask her to come home with a shop vac (wondering for the thousandth time why I got rid of our shop vac when we moved), we’re going to have a long weekend cleaning this mess up.

As an afterthought, I call my insurance company. Their WATS line tells me they are closed, but I can report my claim online. I do. An hour later, they call me to tell me they are sending a water remediation expert to my house – that night.

I’m like Uh, okay. An hour later I have a guy in my house evaluating what I need to have done, and his team shows up with serious gear an go to town.  The remediation guy tells me they’re going to set up fans and dehumidifiers in my house. “It’s going to be loud. For days. It will also raise the temperature in your house by about 15 degrees. For days.”

Uh, okay.

The guy is right on both counts, we have big machines blaring in our house for four days. It's 80 degrees in the house and that's with windows wide open to pull in 60 degree air from the outside.

Bleah.

But enough of the what, let's cut to the why. The cold water shut off on my bathroom tap shot failed.

See it here in the picture?

Yeah, that handle is supposed to be attached. As in here:

Inside the cold water handle, still held in by its screw, are the valve and the valve nut. So the handle shot off because the valve somehow allowed water to get past it and propel it up and off the supply pipe.

I'm thinking I have two more faucets just like this. Was this just one bum faucet? or a failed design?

My faucet is the American Standard Cadet Centerset Faucet. 8125 Series or 8124 Series (no way to tell at this point and the documentation is identical for both). I bought three of these at Home Depot about a year ago.

I get my paperwork and head over to a local plumber. He's set up a storefront so you can walk in and get expert advice and good parts.

I plunk down my documentation and the part and ask him what the heck?

The plumber says "Well, if you buy a Ford anywhere - its a Ford. But if you buy American Standard, it matters where you get it from. These box stores lean on their suppliers to lower their prices - and the suppliers like American Standard are shipping a lower cost version that isn't as good as their regular stuff."

I checked the American Standard website, looks like my faucet (American Standard Cadet Centerset Faucet. 8125 Series or 8124 Series) is only available through Home Depot. According to the plumber, they are total garbage.

He's like, "I'm betting there are going to be an awful lot of lawsuits when these things start failing all over the place. You should save your parts and give them to your insurer. They might be able to get your money back through subrogation."

I'm half listening, half thinking about the two ticking time bombs I left sitting in my upstairs bathrooms.

The plumber digs into his parts cabinet and pulls out a valve with a brass valve nut. "That's the part you need. The valve is basic, but the valve nut is the key piece. Brass isn't always brass. You'll see this bright yellow stuff they call brass but it's just a piece of crap that's waiting to fail on you."

I blow $78 on four valves and four valve nuts, about what I paid for two of my three (useless) American Standard faucets from Home Depot. Swapping them out turns out to be easy enough, but (oh hilarity!) one of the old valve nuts cracks in half while I'm taking it out. Could have had a second flood in my house.

Nice.

So here's the offending object:

On the left is the valve and valve nut in the American Standard Cadet Centerset Faucet (available from Home Depot). As you can see, the valve nut it is coated with calcium carbonate, which means the nut's been getting wet a lot. When the water evaporates, the calcium carbonate remains and crusts things up.

More important than that is the large crack you see in the middle of the valve nut.

For comparison, here's the valve and valve nut I bought to replace it:

New valve nut = good. Old valve nut = total piece of crap.

I don't have a engineering degree or industrial forensic tools, but my kitchen scale gave me a big indicator of how useless the original valve nut was.

Here's the original nut American Standard / Home Depot supplied:

It weighs 1 eighth of an ounce.

The new one I got from the plumber?

It weighs three times as much.

I'm insured, and we'll be re-doing the bathroom, but I'm out my $500 deductible and the major hassle of losing a bathroom for a few weeks while this all gets sorted.

Now, I know I was buying a faucet based on price, but I went with a known brand at a big store.

Which just goes to show you how utterly meaningless those pieces of information are when it comes to quality. Consumer reports doesn't do faucets (there are just too many models) and even if they did, the model numbers would turn over and rapidly make them obsolete.

I have to say I look at Home Depot merchandise very differently now. All the other parts on those faucets were none too solid - and when I see a boxed up toilet that says "Contains everything you need, no tools needed!" right below a giant "Sale!" sign - I'm thinking and what did you turkeys cheap out on to make this price, eh?

Like dad always said: Sometimes the cheapest is the most expensive.