How to Replace a Spigot | Ask This Old House

[Music] there are certain things people expect to see on the outside of their house you know a mailbox a back light the electric meter but what they love to see is an outside garden faucet now there's a lot of names for it the garden faucet silcock spigot and sooner or later they can wear out so i thought we'd take a minute to talk about the care and feeding of an outside silcock or spigot here it is in cutaway right here it has two actions inside one is right here there's full city water pressure right here and there's a washer and as you turn the handle look what happens that washer rises and water will come out through the spigot right here through the hose to the hose so now when you close it you turn it down you compress that washer down against the seat and over time that washer can wear out now they make kits with every kind of size washer you'd need here there's a variety of different kits you might get and you really need to just find the correct washer the hardest part is to get this screw out it's been sitting in water its entire life so you want to take in this case a phillips screwdriver head and then make your connection to it and then back it out if you snap this off you're gonna have to retap it or get a whole new unit okay but then once you take it off put the new one in put it back together again now before you put it back in i want to call out this they make a simple little thing called waterproof grease you see it in the plumbing aisle and you can see right here this is what you would do onto this thread and just put a little bit of grease because this is a metal on metal connections and so now it's going to give you a little more extended life so that's one place it would leak and that's a pretty straightforward repair if the washer comes up but another place you can see or leak is right from the very top and that's called the bonnet when you turn the handle and water comes shooting out through here because that stem is going up and down so if you look underneath this bonnet nut there's a packing and that's called a bonnet packing and what happens is you compress it down so sometimes all you need to do is take a pair of pliers and snug up that bonnet packing so that it compresses tighter against the stem but sometimes that bonnet packing is just worn out and gone so now in some of these master kits they'll have bonnet packings and you hope that it's the right size they also make bonnet packing in different gauges that you can wrap around underneath that bottom nut but for my money i would actually use teflon tape and you can take that teflon tape and really build your own gasket you know your own bonnet packing by just twisting it up putting it on top wrapping it around now you compress it you can press that teflon into a new bonnet packing so with those two repairs you could extend the life of this for a fairly long time now this is what you see most often on most houses in america and it's cheap it's sort of the standard but every year if you live in a coal climb you have to think about how to make sure you turn off the inside faucet and drain this out because look the water sitting right here in harm's way where it could freeze they also make a very interesting device called a frost proof sill cart now you can see the difference they both have handles that actuate a washer but in this case the washer's sitting outside the building right here where it can freeze look at this one here's the house look where the washer is way inside over here so now that's in a place that never gets cold so it can't freeze when you turn the handle you can still see the threads they're going to drive that washer up and down but it's never going to freeze and hence the name frost proof silk so the thing that brought me to this house was the complaint that water was spraying all over the place so to turn the water off inside so here's that bonnet all right all right so the whole unit sort of fell apart so the important part is stuck way inside there we're gonna have to actually replace this whole unit we're gonna have to go deeper so down here in the basement the outdoor faucet is right there if you chase this line back you can see that the shutoff valve is off right here so now i'm good to go and the simplest place for me to work is actually right here so i could cut it simply i'm just going to pull it out from the outside there we go so look at this look how short this was this thing was sitting probably in the sill so it was pretty close to the outside that actually could have frozen now compare that to the new piece right here look at this the washer is way back in here and that's a lot safer now we need to make sure that the new work is the same length as the old so i could tie on here with a threaded adapter put a little bit of teflon tape on here thread it on but i'm worried about the thickness of this shoulder this piece barely came through the hole in that big thick sill so what i'm going to do is actually because i can you can solder right into the inside right here just like this one is down here and that'll keep it a lot thinner and if we solder that on here stick it back in the last thing we'll have to do is to make this coupling connection in a place where i can get at it there's a rubber washer that's sitting right next to we're going to apply all that heat so we need to remove the shank [Music] that's a rubber washer and a gasket that would not like to get too hot okay time to solder [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so water's back on let's give it a little test look at that just like it's supposed to work so with what about an hour's worth of work and probably 50 bucks in material these homeowners now have a faucet they can use in any weather and hopefully this helped you a little bit to help you decide how to service your existing valve or to pick the right one if going new thanks for watching this whole house has got a video for just about every home improvement 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Channel: This Old House

Views: 745,132

Keywords: This Old House, DIY, Construction, Home Improvement, Ask This Old House, Building, Richard Trethewey, outdoor, spigot, plumbing

Id: KvRy5J3G-bU

Length: 7min 20sec (440 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021