Faucet Repair · Highland, CA

If you own a home in Highland, you've probably noticed your faucets don't seem to last like they used to. It's not your imagination and it's not always cheap fixtures. The bigger culprit is the water. East Valley Water District pulls from local groundwater that runs somewhere around 15 to 17 grains of hardness per gallon. That's the U.S. Geological Survey definition of "very hard." Those minerals hitch a ride through every faucet in your house, and they don't leave.

Here's what actually happens inside the faucet. Every time you turn the handle, water passes through a small plastic or ceramic cartridge with rubber seals. hard water leaves a coating of calcium on those seals. Over months, that coating turns to grit. The grit chews the seals, and then you've got a drip. Same story on the aerator screen at the tip of the spout, which is why your kitchen faucet slowly loses pressure over a couple years. We pull them out clogged white with mineral almost every visit.

Faucet repair in Highland is usually a lot cheaper than folks expect. A cartridge swap on a name-brand kitchen faucet, Moen or Delta or Kohler, is often less than an hour of labor and a small part. A full aerator and sprayer cleaning is even quicker. The times it makes more sense to replace the whole faucet are when the finish is corroded through, when it's a no-name brand with no parts available, or when a small leak has already ruined the base of the fixture.

A neighbor over in East Highlands Ranch called us last month after a "faucet guy" quoted her $850 to swap a bathroom faucet plus $200 for each of the two shutoff valves underneath. That's not a repair, that's a paycheck. We did the same job with better parts for a fraction of that. If someone shows up talking bigger numbers than the fixture cost brand new, that's your sign to get a second opinion.

One thing we always recommend when we're already under the sink: swap the angle stops. Those little shutoff valves get seized after about 10 years, especially with hard water, and the day you actually need to turn one off in a hurry is not the day you want to find out it's stuck. Cheap insurance, and it makes every future repair faster.