Kitchen Sink Drain Leaking
Kung Fu Maintenance demonstrates how to remove and replace a water leaking kitchen sink drain.
Today I have got a leaking strainer basket. It’s leaking from right here. It’s cracked and leaking. Let me show you how to replace one of these. I’m going to using a little bit different style to replace it with. I just want to make sure the profile is close enough to work in length and this appears that it will be. It’s going to come up a little bit but we should have enough with the slip joint plumbing to be able to adjust it and make it fit.
I’m removing the old one. I’ve got these three screws here and this loosens the top bracket. This presses the gasket against the sink basin. Let’s pull all this up. Move our disposal cord out of the way here. OK. All right. And then we’re going to remove the bottom out of here. Top portion. OK. And we still got our washer in there which is fine because we’ll need it for the new one. So now it’s just a matter of removing all this here. OK. OK. Well, one way to get it off. All right. OK.
Anyway, it is a good idea to wear gloves especially when working with the plumber’s putty as the plumber’s putty can be kind of stinky. This way when you go to eat lunch, your sandwich doesn’t wind up tasting like plumber’s putty because I could tell you it’s not a good taste. This part should unscrew. Now the plumber’s putty is falling down. OK. Nasty stuff. And some more.
There we go. Separated that. That just sat under cup. Man is that nasty or what? All right. So now we just push the old one out.
Now in our new kit, we want to separate of all this portion. And it does have handy instructions one the bottom anyway. And this trim plate and the gasket go on the bottom portion, so the top portion just passes through and seats. And I’ll undo all this twisty tie to pull out the strainer basket and get this thing going here. And it’s got its own collar nut. For the collar nut portion, this and this here, and slide the slip joint plumbing up and off out here so that we can replace this collar nut with this one here. OK. This little piece goes inside the top here and this piece slides on to the bottom. And then this part slides on here like so. And now it’s ready for assembly, but we don’t want to get too crazy with it until we’re ready there, OK. The rest of it is on the bottom here. What we can do is go ahead and get this ready– is this seal plate and the gasket goes on the bottom here. So now we’re ready and we’ll go up top.
OK, up top here we got our draining opening. And again here’s our new basket. OK and what we want to do is put plumber’s putty around the inside here. First we’ll clean this off so we have a nice clean area to meet here. Let me get my gloves going here because this plumber’s putty is smelly stuff. If you got any old junky stuff it’s probably a good idea to go ahead and get rid of the contaminant stuff here. We want nice fresh, clean plumber’s putty. What you want to do is roll it like Play-Doh in a circle. And we want to make a circle all the way around this here and kind of press it into place so that there is not going to be any chance of any spot getting missed because once this presses into place it’s going to squeeze everything out and seal between the two. This metal and the plastic. Now that that’s in place, we don’t want to get any on the threads here– on any of these threads. We just want to seat like so.
So now we’re ready on the bottom portion, and what you need is a screwdriver or something that you can stick down in the slot there to keep it from turning. I’m going to use my Leatherman because it’s got a bigger screwdriver– fatter screwdriver than my screwdriver. So anyway, a nice big screwdriver here. I’ll just insert that in a slot and use that to keep it from turning.
Now I’ll come back to the bottom. We already got our trim plate and gasket here and ring ready to go here. So we slide these up to the top and then just carefully thread this on making sure it’s not cross threaded and then just spin it into place. Up top it’s going to start to squeeze the plumber’s putty out as we tighten this down. And then we just tighten it securely, this quarter turn. That’s tight. Make sure this is on there. And you ought to look at your gasket to try and make sure it’s pretty much even all the way around. There we go. OK. Now I’ll get my Leatherman back.
Now on the bottom portion, you’re going to slide this up to meet, and you can see this part is too short. It’s not going to reach all the way. We’ll tighten this portion on. And this we’ll just hand tighten it. It’s nice and snug. Then on the bottom, that’s what we’re going to have to do– is loosen this portion here and hopefully this has enough room to slide up a bit more onto here. Just loosen this and this is usually hand tightened. It looks like someone’s tightened it a little bit more. Going to loosen this up. This particular fitting up top has a beveled washer where as this had a flat washer like this. Where it’s got different types of washer. This particular nut here that I’m twisting has the washer built into itself. But anyway you can see we have enough room now to slide this portion up more. So we’ll use this down at the bottom and we can tighten it down here and now we’ll have enough. Our pipe will be extended enough. Again always take care not to get cross threaded. This is just difficult slip joint plumbing and it generally only needs to be hand tightened. OK. There we go.
OK, so we got everything hand tightened now, and now we’re ready to leak test it. But before we do that what we want to do is come up here and just remove any of the excess putty from the top here. We’re just going to pull this out all the way around. And as long as this is clean, we can put it back in our plumber’s putty bucket. If it’s got any kind of contaminants or anything just throw it away. It’ll be better off. And if there’s any doubt, just throw it away. Plumber’s putty is only like $1.00, $1.15 for little bucket so no biggie.
So before I make it perfect I’m going to go ahead and just run the water and leak test it here. Look for any leaks down below. And at this point it’s a good point to go ahead and field test it. Your hand’s a little more sensitive than just doing it by eye. Sometimes you can’t see that well. All right and it seems to be holding good, so now what we want to do is pressure test it. And the way we pressure test it is to put our sink basket in or plunger. And this particular model actually came with its own sink drainer basket. I guess it’s holding the water so enough for the pressure test. We’ll fill it up about a quarter to half way. Somewhere around there. And then go ahead and pull the plug while checking down below. I’m going to go ahead and pull the plug and that’ll force the water through a lot faster. And it appears that we’re good here. No leaks. Nothing dripping.
Now we’re going to go ahead and clean it up up here. We’ll go ahead and pull all the blue trim off. A nice, shiny brand-new deal here. And then we want to cleanup all this excess plumber’s putty. So we want it to just do its job but be invisible. And we don’t want it to get in anybody’s rag or anything like that when they’re going to clean so I’ll just take my screwdriver and rotate it around the inside lip, just to take off all that excess stuff here. All right.
And then, now we’ll go ahead and pressure test it again. And this time I’ll use the actual strainer that came with the basket. And this just goes in only in one way, and usually it sits like this and you get most of your food chunks out. And if you want to plug the drain just turn it in like so. And now we’re going to go ahead and fill it again and retest it. And as it fills with water, we’re going to check all around here and all down here to make sure that we don’t have any leaks showing up. You’d rather do this once then have to come back and do it again. That’s a mess with the wet cabinets and all. It seems like we’re holding good here though. We’ll just go about halfway full and then go ahead and pull your plug. And we’ll check for any leaks down here. And it looks like we’re good. Nope, no leaks. Everything’s nice and clear and no leaks showing up, so we’re all set there. Job complete. That’s how you replace a sink basket. Good to go. Nice and shiny. Nice and new. All set.