OK. Here’s kind of a nice temporary easy disposer guard if you have got a damaged one. Of course it is always better to replace the actual disposer guard if possible. But just for a quick fix. You know the longer fix is to pull the disposer down and replace that gasket there. These get worn and damaged but this is a little quick fix for a disposer guard like that. Keep stuff. You know minimize the big stuff from going down there. Nice little quick easy fix. Alright. Good to go.
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OK. Details details details. I just one little thing I noticed here. This disposal plug should actually loop up and over the plumbing here. It just prevents the deal from getting wet. Sitting in any water down below or anything like that. If you did have a leak. Which I actually do. Uh oh. OK.
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Up on the roof doing a little preventative maintenance here noticed a fan baffle was missing a screw. Don’t want that. The fan baffle will fall into the unit. Than we’ll have a real mess on our hands. So I located another screw and going to use my garbage disposer tool to lift it up. Lift up the fan baffle and reset the screw. There we go. Oops. I lost my garbage disposal tool. But. No big deal I have got plenty of those. If I ever need to take this lid off. I will recover that. At least now the fan baffle is not going to fall in there. Hit the fan. Give us a no cool call for an AC not working. Good to go.
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Kung Fu Maintenance demonstrates how to fix a high rise faucet that is leaking from the neck and explains the importance of using a high temperature faucet grease to make the repair last for a long time.
Today I’m going to be showing you how to repair a leaking high-rise faucet. It’s showing it’s leaking at the neck here. See all the water coming out? That’s not right. It’s going to be leaking down below, and we don’t want that. Anyway, for this repair, we don’t need to turn the water off. If you have a single handle faucet, for that type of repair you would need to turn the water off. A lot of times, this one you can do by hand, this one here. Just turn it out.
If you did need to use a pair of channel locks, you’re going to want to protect your jaws with tape like so, to prevent marring the neck here. You also could use a strap wrench for this, which is a lot better than channel locks. Because channel locks could deform the neck if you were to squeeze it too tight, it could deform or reshape the neck as well as mark it up.
But a strap wrench kind of grabs it, tightens down and you can cinch it down and turn it out. But anyway, this one we can do by hand. Inside here, there’s three O-rings, and these are the O-rings that we’re going to need to replace here. Now I already know my sizes of O-rings that I need, but if you don’t know what sizes you need, they do sell an O-ring kit. The stuff that I’m going to be using is pretty stinky.
It’s this faucet grease here, and if you get it on your hands, it’s pretty tough to wash off. Because it’s a high temperature faucet grease and it’s meant to not wash off with water. When you go to repair this, you’re going to want to wear gloves, and a good way to do this is to wear two or three pairs of these disposable gloves.
You’ll see reason I do this is this stuff’s so smelly. What you can do is unwrap the glove, one of the gloves, in order to use your tools and not get the faucet grease all over your tool. Not get the faucet grease all over the outside of the faucet. This faucet is going to be in need of some cleaning afterwards anyway, but that’s another story.
The easy way to get these O-rings off is to use a small flathead screwdriver. I’ve got one in my Leatherman, so it comes in handy for this. And it’s just a matter of picking these off, fairly simple. If you keep them together, you can use that to size up your new O-ring to make sure you’re getting the right size. And all three of these are the same size, so you really only need to keep one together so if you needed to cut it, you could.
Not a big deal. Okay. One, two, three O-rings, another reason for the gloves there. Now what you want to do is coat this so that underneath it, it’ll have a coating of the faucet grease. This stuff can be a little tricky to get apart sometimes, and mine’s getting kind of old. It’s time to order some more faucet grease. So anyway, go underneath where your O-rings are going to go. Okay. Now we’ll slip our new O-rings on. Here’s the first one. Yeah, the gloves are going to make it a little tricky, but it’s what it is, job security.
There’s the second one, and number three. Now we’re going to coat the outside of the O-rings with the faucet grease. This is a high temperature faucet grease, so it’s not going to come off with hot water, and lubing this all around is going to prevent our O-rings from pinching up inside there.
Because if they pinch then they’re going to break, and then your faucet’s going to leak. Okay, now that we got that, this is the good time to go ahead and remove that outer layer of the gloves. We can dispose of those. Now we’re ready to put our faucet neck back together.
So we can slip this up, and then push it in all the way around gently, and then go ahead and slowly hand thread this in place so that we don’t get it cross-threaded. We can get rid of these, and we’re just going to hand tighten this down. Once that’s nice and tight…and now once that’s nice and tight, just hand tightened, we’re going to prove it and check for any leaks.
Now if we see any leaks here, then can use our channel locks to tighten it up a little bit more, but it looks like everything’s good here, no leaks.
So now you want to check underneath for any leaks, and you’ll need to remove your gloves to do that. I’m going to take these off now and check for any leaks down below. Now first, you want to take your rag, dry everything off. It looks like we’ve got a loose handle there also. I’ll show you how to tighten that up, it’s just an Allen wrench under here, it’s real easy, but that’s another story. I may put out another video how to tighten those down. I can try to put the link on the video here.
Going to come down below the sink and feel all around for any leaks. Now, you may have to dry everything off and check this the following day, as it was leaking before. So you probably have some water that’s still trapped inside there, so you’re going to have to just keep an eye on this, and do what you can to dry it out.
Then go ahead and turn the water on. If you see a flood of water, you know you’ve got a problem you’ve got to deal with. But if you’re just feeling a little bit of moisture from before, you’re actually okay.
An old trick is after you dry everything up below, is to put paper towels down, or toilet paper in order to check it. Wow, there’s something wrong here, someone skipped the air gap, that’s not good for the dishwasher. You don’t want to do that.
Skipping that air gap can make you really sick, because the air gap prevents the sewer gases from going into your food when it passes from your disposer, so you definitely don’t want to run it straight in like this.
This is wrong. So if you see this, you definitely want to install an air gap to prevent getting harmful bacteria and everything into your dishwasher. Anyway, that’s another story also. Anyway, if we have no leaks here we’re all set, good to go. One fixed high-rise kitchen faucet. Good to go.
OK. Here’s what we want for the cords when we are passing these through for appliances. For this particular one we drill a half inch hole. This part clamps on the cord and the cord gets passed through and you drill your half inch hole. Pass this through the appliance. Tighten the nut on and good to go. This just keeps the cord from rubbing against the sharp edges of any sheet metal that’s been drilled through, It also anchors the cord in place so that it won’t get pulled out. Most appliances such as dishwashers and garbage disposers will have a predrilled knockout and you’ll just want to use one of these to pass through. If you are not reusing the old cords. Sometimes you can reuse the old cord if it is in good shape having no breaks in the insulation. This is what you would add to a new cord or a new pig tail to make it safer and to anchor the cord in place.
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Kung Fu Maintenance demonstrates how to use pressure tests to find even the smallest hidden plumbing drain line leaks.
How To DIY Sink Drain Pressure Test To Find Leaks
OK. So today I wanted to show you how to do the pressure test. This is a way to find and make any leaks that are in the sink drain plumbing show up pretty quickly.
Plumbing Leak Pressure Test
Had a repair done here where the coupling snapped and put a clamp on here to make it hold it all together but want to prove that that’s actually going to hold it. Make sure. So what we are going to do is force the water through very quickly. Went ahead and put the plug drain in. Fill up the water in the sink. Turn on the disposer and than pull the plug and than we will watch down below for any leaks. This will make any, even the smallest leak show up. And we’re good there. No leaks.
Good to go. Anyway I just plugged the drain. Let it fill up. Turn the disposer on. Pull the plug and let it force the water through. We are good to go there. No leaks.
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Kung Fu Maintenance shows changing out a broken garbage disposer video while explaining many of the different factors, an often missed step for longevity, to keep things working great, and converting from a threaded slip joint drain connection to a flanged tailpiece compression fitting.
I’ve got a garbage disposal leak, and showing how to replace it. This particular garbage disposal; I see these wear out tends to be a lot faster. There’s two different styles of garbage disposals: One where it’s got a threaded end like this. I seem to not have very much luck with these; they seem to leak a lot more and crack. The other kind of disposal has this end; I’ll show you how that gets hooked up.
We got to unplug our plug, undo our disposal drain line. Take this off carefully because usually there’s some water left in the line. We’re going to replace this piece, it’s what’s called the tailpiece. Looks like this instead; it’s got this flanged end that we can stick our rubber gasket against and link that through the disposal.
I usually use my knee to lift this up and then turn these locking plate out, and then move the disposal down, like so.
If our cord’s not in bad shape, we can reuse it. This one, the cord has already partly come out. Usually, this gets locked in underneath but it looks like someone didn’t bend the second tab out underneath this portion. Once you put this in, then you have to bend this tab out. For our purposes, it’s just going to make it easier to do a new one.
Looking at my cord, everything looks in good shape. No breaks in the insulation, so I can reuse this. Pop our top off. There’s our neutral, there’s the hot. It’s already a part. Now screw. That’s our new disposal. Since we’re hooking up a dishwasher line, we’ve got to known out this knockout. Just use my flat blade of my screwdriver and hammer, and knock this in. Make sure I retrieve my piece.
If you look inside the knockout hole hat we just did, you can see a ridge around the inside; these little burrs. What you want to do is take the flat bade knife and just rotate it inside and take that edge off so that it doesn’t leave a place for food to hang out. This is an often cause of the disposal drain line being clogged. One more little burr. Nice and clear now. Then we’re going to pick up our pigtail, take off our access plate, our ground screw.
When you’re facing the outlet, the hot is on the right side, generally. You can follow the right side of the cord all the way back to here. This one’s going to be my hot. We’re going to feed the wires into our disposal port. I’m just going to hookup my hot so we don’t forget which one’s where. Twist these together a little bit. We’re going to use our wire connector. Here’s our neutral, our ground.
Hookup our ground, and then I’ll show you how this deal fits in. I’m going to turn it this way so that we have access to the prong that’s not bent yet. We put the bent end in first, and then push this side in, like so. Then we’re going to insert our screwdriver in underneath here, and then the tab out so that we lock it into place, like so. That protects the wire from rubbing against the sharp edge of the sheet metal. Here’s our plate. We’re ready for action.
Back to our plumbing deal. We can’t use this end. We might get away with it for a couple days, but eventually, it’s going to leak. What we need to do is convert it to our tailpiece, which is right here. We need this flanged end out. Just remove this side. We’re going to use these on this end. We can slip this on and then we can jump this part, this rubber gasket. It’s important; we want the gasket to seat up against the edge of the tailpiece flange. We’re going to slide our deal here, like so. We may have to trim this end a little bit depending on the space that we have for the disposal. There we go. We’re going to slide that on there.
Once again, I’m going to use my knee to lift the disposer up and lock it into place. Sometimes I can just lift it with my hand. Sometimes I just use my knee underneath it to hold it; that way I got two hands free. I can also if I need to. We rotate these pieces in. Sometimes if these are really stuck, if you’re trying to take it off, you can insert your screwdriver into these parts and pull it over. I find usually I’m able to just undo it. I’m going to re-hook my disposer line. I should peek in here that this is clear; there’s not a whole bunch of gunk and stuff in. Here, you don’t want to tighten this clamp down too tight; just nice and snug, 1/4 -turn past tight is good. The reason being, the seam for the disposer goes right through the middle of the disposer drain line port, and if you tighten this down too much, you can crack it.
For our tailpiece, see how it fits in. Looks like we’re going to need to trim just a hair off maybe. Let’s see. No, we’re going to be okay. This side’s just nice and easy: Slip joint plumbing tightens the beveled washer inside there to seal the ends, and this side uses a compression fitting. They’re both compression fittings, but you get the idea. We’ll just tighten these up nice and easy. Then when we go to plug our cord in, we want to get it off the ground so we want to loop it over the drain line; that way it’s not hanging in water or anything like that. There we go. Clean up my mess down here. We’re ready to test it out.
We can field test it for any leaks. Beautiful; no leaks. The better way of testing is to do what’s called a pressure test. Just take your plug and plug the drain line. Let the sink fill up, turn the disposer on, and then pull the drain plug. That’ll force the water through extra-fast. Even any little pinhole leak will show up so we can prove that we don’t have any leaks down here. Turn on the disposal. We’re all set. Good to go.
Kung Fu Maintenance shows you how to make a tired stainless steel kitchen sink look like new again.
I have been wanting to make this video for a while.
There’s any number of cleaners that you can use, but the real key is the green scrubber pad. These types of cleaners, you never want to use this on a fiberglass tub or on porcelain because this has little bits of metal in it, and it actually kind of sands stuff. So you don’t want to use this on anything that it would scratch, leave a bunch of scratches on. You can use just regular dish soap or any other cleaner. You do want to follow it up when you’re finished with some type of stainless steel polish. There’s any number of brands out there, a satin finish or whatever. That’ll make a big difference.
Anyway, one of the most common cleaners, I guess, starts with a four and ends with a nine. You spray it on like this.
So I’m just going to spray it down real good and let it sit for a second. And I’m going to go ahead and put some gloves on. And we can see it’s pretty knarly stained there. Let’s see how this works out. Got my gloves on. Now to use it, it’s just like sandpaper and sand it. And this is called regraining.
Up here a little bit, You can see all these calcium deposits around the air jet of the disposer, dishwasher drain line. So we’re going to just sand all of these off, too.
It doesn’t take a whole lot of pressure, on the sponge just moderate pressure. I’m not going to do this yet because I want to show you the difference between when you do it. So I haven’t sanded the drain yet. So sand around by the faucet– all those gnarly areas. Let’s take a peek down there. See all that in there.
And once you get up all the areas sanded– yeah, I didn’t sand in the drain yet– I just wanted to show you the difference. Maybe at the end of this video I can show a complete before and after photo because I forgot to take a photo of it before, but I guess I can grab a still frame from the video. And it might take you a couple of runs, but it’s worth it if it makes you– it’s beginning to look like new.
I didn’t do the drain yet. I can show you get a good shot of the drain here. And now I’ll go ahead and do it. Now you can see around the ridges, on the inside, all that brown gunk. So you can go ahead and spray it with your chemical, and then take your green scrubber sponge and use moderate pressure. It doesn’t have to be super, super hard, but just hard enough. And just sand it all the way around it.
There. And now I wil go ahead and rinse it out. And you can probably see an improvement already. And rinse the rest of the sink.
There’s a bit of a buildup here and rinse that off. Here now we can use our sponge to clean it all off and move it all down. And it’s in here that we find and can get rid of.
We’ve just removed all the calcium buildup. I can see a lot underneath the faucet, also. And this will work for that also. It may be easier to get in there and come back later with a toothbrush or with a wire brush, but I’m going to do it a little bit, do what I can. Make that at least a little bit better.
It makes it a little more manageable. It’s probably not going to be perfect, but anyway. At least it won’t look quite as bad. You’ve got to pick your battles sometimes, do what you can do. And maybe little by little descale it out, spend some more time, make that better.
I’m going to go grab my rag, but you can already see the whole thing is looking quite a bit better. Still has that white residue here. Got that calcium deposit. I had professional cleaners come in and clean this already. And that’s how dirty it was after they cleaned it. Not everybody knows this trick. Now that you’re watching this video, you’ll know this trick which is pretty simple. It’s hard to even call it a trick, but hey, it is what it is. You can show a difference between start and finish. Yeah, it is what it is.
And it really is about the details. There’s always room for the top of this here.
I’m going to go grab my rag and let this down, and then I’ll show you the polish portion. I think we’re pretty good there. Use my rag, and I wipe all the cleaning chemical out. I really don’t want to mix chemicals here. And if there’s anything else that shows up– maybe we should get that while we’re here, too, and see a little bit of calcium deposits here. It takes what it takes. A junky job. Might be only a few minutes, but a good job might take you 30 minutes, but still we’re going to make the difference. You can see all the buildup there? Sand it out again.
Work it out down the middle, a little sanding-like motion. I usually like to sand it in advance, back and forth. Those spots might call for a little circular motion. Whatever it takes, right? I need to get it up here. That looks a lot better. Up here you can probably see some smaller stuff sticking.
I’ll just make it a little bit better. So also around this area, I can still use a little bit of detailing. And a tiny bit there.
This part, around the dishwasher, the air gap. You can tell where this has backed up before. It’s all clear now, but you can definitely tell the water is coming out of there on a regular basis which indicates that the drain line from the dishwasher drain line to the area, the air gap to the disposal. That line from the air gap to the disposal has been clogged before because when you see water spit out of here, that’s what that indicates.
That’s some stubborn stains back there. Even this is having a hard time with it. So I’m going to let that part of it sit for a little bit. Spray a little chemical in there.
It’s pretty darn stubborn there. That seems that we’re getting it. Anyway, this is what you call re-graining the kitchen sink or a stainless steel sink. It works on anything that’s made of stainless steel that’s thick enough to take the pressure of you pushing this on it. That’s a bit better. It’s not perfect, but enough for you to understand the difference.
So now what you want to do is take a fresh towel, and you want to go ahead and spray your stainless steel polish on. Firstly, Always read the manufacturer recommendations for the particular one that you’re using. Most of them you just spray it on, let it sit for a little while, and then wipe if off. Most of them smell pretty good, too. And when you wipe it off, you want to wipe it off with a dry cloth. Just makes it more satin, more polished. It definitely works a lot better if you re-grain it first like we did.
So we’ll let it sit for a little bit. Grab your dry rag. If it’s sitting even for a bit, it starts to dry a little bit. These particular directions tell us to shake the can well, polish surface to a bright, spotless shine with a clean, dry cloth or towel. If you’re using this in the food processing area, you’ve got to make sure that you can’t smell anything before you use it. That’s a little scary. You don’t want to get this on floors or they can get slippery. And the product contains silicone. So it has a lubricating quality, kind of like what silicone spray does. And we can go ahead and start to wipe this off. See how it starts to come out.
Get our faucet, also. Polish does more than just make it look good for now. It also coats it with a finish that helps the water to run off. Definetly a good thing.
So then, back on the rag. Dry it off here. Yeah, the details do make a difference there. Down inside our drain here. I have to rub this out, polish this out.
See if there’s any other areas that need our attention. It looks like right here could use a little bit more of re-graining. There you go.
Wipe if off with our cleaning rag and spray it with our polish. Rub that out. Looks like one more little bit in there right here.
And there we go. One regrained and polished stainless steel sink. This one happens to to be a kitchen sink.
One water drips from the front usually caused by a clogged float switch. 0:22
Two is water spilling out of the counter top air gap most often caused by a clogged air gap drain line. 1:42
Three is a clogged drain line usually at the air gap itself. 2:31
Four is a soap cover that won’t work caused by a detached spring. 4:00
Five is a dishwasher motor that hums but doesn’t start caused by a stuck impeller. 4:47
00:10 Alright
00:15 time to cover a bunch different troubles on this day
00:18 with dishwashers
Clogged Dishwasher Float Cup Switch
00:22 Water dripping from the front here dripping down
00:27 sometimes leaves a calcium deposit or you see water spilling from there
00:32 most often is a stuck float preventing the switch from turning off
00:35 this particular model has a float cover
00:40 with a small phillips screw in back that can be removed
00:43 Most often it is just soap residue, soap scum just piles up inside there
00:49 and it’ll appear worse than it really is but it is usually just soap scum remaining
00:54 So look here I’m not sure, this one may not be leaking how I was explaining but
01:01 yes, look at all the soap scun under here well this
01:07 small cup floats up as the washer fills and enables this tiny switch here sets off that
01:15 tiny switch and that’s how the washer learns
01:17 well that’s how the dishwasher engages to stop the water fill cycle
01:23 moving on we need to clear all this scum off there
01:27 and that is the way you remedy that problem
01:30 I am going to clear this all out because I’m getting the place ready
01:34 this way
01:36 when somebody lives here
01:38 they don’t recieve a surprise when they first use the machine
01:42 Right here on the dishwasher is the air gap
01:46 if you notice water
01:48 spill out of the air gap
01:51 this shows
01:52 the air gap to garbage disposal drain line
01:55 is clogged from the air gap
02:00 below here you can see the flexible plumbing going to the garbage disposal, this is
Dishwasher Disposer Drain Line
02:05 the air gap to disposal drain line and this gets plugged up with debris and junk so you need to
02:09 unscrews the clamp and clear out this line or replace it
02:14 either way and for stubborn clogs you can connect it to
02:18 a hose faucet and just flush it out, to clear it out
02:22 there’s another method also using a long brush
02:25 push it down
02:27 inside the line
02:28 take off this cap first
02:31 Now if your dishwasher would not drain
02:33 this would be a good time to look inside this cap to
Dishwasher Air Gap Blockage Check
02:37 many times there is
02:41 put this down so I can use my other hand on it
02:42 next you just press in these two side clips and than just pull the cap right up
02:47 I not sure you could see that but there’s a chicken bone down the line
02:51 many times if you’re disposal drain will not drain
02:55 it is time to have a look here
02:59 and
03:01 in order to remove that chicken bone to float up I am going to pour some water down there and try float it up to the top
03:11 maybe it will float up when the line is full
03:15 Perhaps it is light enough, I have seen it with parts of plastic and such
03:20 It is filled now
03:26 but no it isn’t going to float up here for me but if it was a plastic toothpick
03:42 or something like that ocasionally you can get it to float up so now I will need to do run this through the drain cycle for a split second and it is going to shoot water up and out but I need to launch that out of there
03:55 so I will come return to that afterwords I just wanted to show you all a lot of different sources of trouble
03:58 in dishwashers
04:00 Occasionally here
Dishwasher Soap Dish Not Staying Closed
04:02 the spring for the soap dish gets
04:04 broken off, often they pop off
04:07 and you can take apart both sides of the door and than replace the spring, it is a bit
04:10 of a trick but you just search for a place, to find, to reanchor the spring for the latch
04:15 to
04:17 many times it takes a bit more adjusting to get it, let’s see
04:24 this one seems to be working alright, well it’s actually not very strong so this one appears, well maybe
04:29 the spring has popped off
04:31 normally it would
04:33 just open automatically when it rotates to the correct spot
04:37 yes this soap dish is
04:38 surely broke so that needs to be repaired
04:42 by resetting the spring
04:45 What other things can I share with you?
04:47 On occasion
04:48 the impeller will freeze up
04:52 dishwashers, there are four screws holding the bottom trim plate
04:56 each brand impeller is a little bit different
04:59 this brand model has
05:02 a fan attached to it and you can just turn the
05:05 fan blades to free up the stuck impeller
05:08 Let me take out the four screws. Different types you will need to use perhaps a screwdriver
05:13 or two screwdrivers and use like wedges against the
05:17 motor impeller to free up the impeller
05:21 Keep turning it till it turns freely
05:23 You will feel it resist for a bit
05:25 than suddenly it will turn rather easily
05:29 This will most likely be somewhat nasty
05:30 under here
05:36 here is the sound insulation
05:38 helps mimimize the noise
05:41 the impeller
05:42 When you run the
05:45 dishwasher if you hear a humming but it doesn’t fully turn on that is
05:49 most likely the impeller froze
05:51 Disconnect power first for sure
05:53 next
05:54 reach down right back here and I’m not sure if you see it all that good but maybe if I can get my
06:00 flashlight on here to give you all a better view
06:09 place you in here
06:11 a tiny bit and
06:15 I am not sure if you can see the blades of the fan
06:17 there but I will rotate them with my opposite hand
06:23 many times if they were really hard to start turning
06:26 and than it will just free up and start to turn freely
06:28 It should turn nice and easy and that is the way you can free those up if they were stuck
Stuck Dishwasher Impeller Free Up
06:33 different types you will see the impeller shaft
06:37 right there and you will be able to rotate it
06:43 so that’s a bit concerning dishwashers there
06:45 some of the most often sources of trouble you will encounter maintenance wise
