How (Not?) to Replace a Faucet
"This is crazy..."
I was in a fug today, despite the beautiful weather and no real problems to solve outside my own head, when my plumber showed up at my front door unexpectedly. When I saw who it was, I knew why he was here, and my mood lifted instantly and drastically. He presented me with a 10” threaded tube of gold anodized aluminum. We re-acknowledged, in a much briefer exchange than our phone call two days earlier, our bemusement that such a simple part, that a small child could install, could render a $500 kitchen faucet not just unusable, but un-donate-able. He added that the ceramic cartridges now used universally in plumbing valves never wear out—but their rubber washers do, and you can’t buy those—you have to buy the whole cartridge, and throw away the basically-immortal ceramic part. “The whole damn world works that way,” he said. He found the tube I was now holding in his pile of faucets that he has pulled out of customers’ homes recently.
This gets crazier—especially from the perspective of a historian of technology—of people thinking up ways of manipulating the material resources at their disposal. Almost anyone at any other time in modern history would assume that I now had the part I needed to fix my faucet and get on with using it. Almost anyone at any other time in modern history would be correct in that assumption. But not here, and not now. When something went “clunk” the week before last, and our kitchen faucet fell over, I discovered it was because years of water leaking in around the base of the faucet (the countertop wasn’t level—we won’t get into all that) had rotted the plywood underneath, and caused the aluminum, where it had a steel nut on it, to corrode through. Not a defect—just chemistry.
I went to the plumbing supply store, as you do, with what I needed to replace. The nice helpful man there said to go home, call Moen (the manufacturer), and that they would at the very least send me the parts for free, and probably just send me a brand-new faucet. “They have really good customer service,” he said.
He was correct. They didn’t just send me a new faucet. They sent me a new faucet that was more expensive than the one I had—just because the one I had was backordered, and they didn’t want me to wait. And they sent it FedEx.
Why? Because Moen doesn’t sell that aluminum tubing piece as a stand-alone part. If they did, it would probably retail for about fifteen bucks. Instead, they sent me a $660 faucet. I fixed the countertop and installed that. I was all good—but now I had a $500 faucet—all this beautiful, heavy, finely-machined chromed brass and stainless—that just needed this stupid tube, and a nut to thread onto it, to be perfectly usable. Without that, I couldn’t even donate the thing to Habitat for Humanity.
This is crazy. I texted a machinist neighbor of mine, who makes parts for GE aircraft engines. He said it would probably cost $150--$160 to have a machine shop make one—maybe more, as he hadn’t been on that end of things in a while. I called Moen again—they confirmed that they had replaced the faucet because they didn’t sell the mounting tube as a separate part.
Some of you may know that the United States got rather famous in the nineteenth century for committing to a manufacturing emphasis on interchangeable parts—that if a part broke on a U.S. rifle, for instance, you could get the part, and it would be exactly the same as that part on any other rifle of that model, and fix your rifle. This was in contrast to the older, and still-practiced, way of making things semi-custom, by hand, which makes it harder to “plug and play,” as we say now.
Just throwing that in there as it occurred to me.
My machinist neighbor didn’t need a faucet, so he didn’t want to make the part.
So I called Jeffrey (my plumber) and asked him what to do. I told him there was no way I was just going to “throw away” a perfectly good $500 five-year-old faucet because it was missing something so simple. He confirmed that I couldn’t donate it without the part, because no one would take it, and he said he would check his pile of parts to see if he had one; he thought he remembered pulling a Moen out of someone’s house the other week. I said something to the effect that surely these mounting tubes would be interchangeable on Moen faucets. He said yes, they would be.
I figured that would be the last I heard of it; he’s busy, as any good plumber is in this country with a serious plumber shortage; and in our culture, it’s common to use “I’ll get back to you on that” as a polite, deflective way of saying “we’re done with this now.”
But, a few minutes ago, there he was, with the elusive piece of Unobtanium in his hand.
I have no interest in writing an essay whose theme is “back in my day, things made sense …”—this is a history-of-technology series, even if it is (intentionally) rather wide-ranging.
I am interested, then, in pointing out a moment in the passage of modern human history, and putting that moment in some perspective. And this moment in the history of technology—or, at least, the aspect of it I’m highlighting here—is bizarre.
I’m not qualified to move into a discussion of early 21st-century corporate capitalism and what happens next. We all need to be thinking and talking about that, as people in the world, but I have no license to use this platform for that. I’m supposed to stick to “something I know something about,” as a mentor of mine once said in class.
I am qualified to say that, if you suspect that the real-life scenario I just described to you would strike most people from most times and places up to this point as weird, your suspicion is correct.
New York passed an electronics right-to-repair law this year or late last year. The Colorado legislature just passed an agricultural right-to-repair law. It’s now a mainstream political issue. I read that fix-it clubs, where people gather informally so that those who know can show those who don’t how to fix lamps, toasters, whatever, are not uncommon right now.
After a trip to the hardware store for the right nut, I can donate this $500 faucet to Habitat. Scratch that—I had to order a Moen mounting kit from Amazon; the nut is “specialized,” as the hardware store expert told me. After that, I donated it.
I told Jeffrey, my plumber, that maybe we should be more like the Cubans, who just keep fixing their ’57 Chevys. Since this is in print, I have to put in the disclaimer that I am not trying to make light of their deprivations, or the central role of my country’s government in perpetuating those—a policy I have always despised. But with all the talk of “sustainability” in current popular discourse, it might be worth considering where we’re at when a person of modest means and status such as myself—not a king, mogul, rajah, pope, or sultan—is more or less expected to accept a $660 faucet in lieu of a $15 part and then throw away the $500 faucet he had. Some would say that it’s a great privilege to be living at such a moment in history, and I would agree. I think it’s too much of a privilege, and that the price is too high. We’d all be just fine repairing $500 faucets with $15 parts.
New York right-to-repair bill:
https://www.ifixit.com/News/70515/new-york-passes-historic-right-to-repair-bill
Colorado agricultural right-to-repair: go here
NBC’s Today Show: right-to-repair clinics: