It’s happened to me before. You turn on a tap (often for some reason it ends up being your hot water tap) and you keep turning and turning and it WON’T TURN OFF! You panic because you have a hell of a lot of water running down the drain… but what to do when the handle won’t turn any further? What do you do when your tap won’t turn off?
When Your Tap Won’t Turn Off
When in this situation, don’t panic. Turn off the hot water from your hot water unit and this will stop the water from running. Alternatively if it’s the cold water tap, you will have to turn off your water meter at the front of your property.
Once this has been done, if you have the tap washers or jumper valves as they are correctly termed. You can replace these yourself. You will need to reseat the tap before changing the washers.
Alternatively ring a plumber and they will do the job for you. They will replace with a high quality jumper valve. They may need to replace the tap spindles or sometimes a complete new set of taps if the seat is damaged and the jumper valves will no longer seal.
I have found that generally, it’s usually the washer which has split and only requires to be replaced. You may need to use fine tweezers to remove the broken bits of washer. Use a torch as you won’t be able to replace your washers if there is debris from the last washers in the way.
Generally these types of situations happen when the washers haven’t been changed on the taps and/or the taps are really old and have worn out meaning the spindles won’t turn to stop the water flow. Either situation will need the service of a plumber to fix the issue.
It is a relatively easy problem to fix.
