Tap Repair near you

There is no plumbing licence to check. The Water Supply (Water Fittings) Regulations 1999 regulate the fitting and the work rather than the person doing it, and the assurance they offer is the approved contractor scheme: under regulation 6, where a water fitting is installed, altered, connected or disconnected by an approved contractor, that contractor must give the person who commissioned the work a signed certificate stating whether the fitting complies with the Regulations. The Drinking Water Inspectorate recommends employing a qualified plumber, for example one accredited through the WaterSafe scheme, and that accreditation is the practical route to an approved contractor in most of Britain.

Most tap work needs no notice to anyone. The Table in regulation 5 lists the operations for which advance notice must be given to the water undertaker — erecting a building, installing a bath with a capacity of more than 230 litres measured to the centre line of overflow, a pump or booster drawing more than 12 litres per minute connected to a supply pipe, and constructing a pond or pool over 10,000 litres replenished automatically, among others — and swapping a tap is not among them. Where notice is required, the undertaker may withhold or condition consent by a notice given within ten working days, and consent is treated as given if it says nothing in that period.

Scotland and Northern Ireland reach the same ends through their own instruments. Section 70 of the Water (Scotland) Act 1980 empowers Scottish Water to make byelaws preventing waste, undue consumption, misuse or contamination of the water it supplies, and lets it have non-compliant fittings altered, repaired or replaced and recover the cost from the person in default. Northern Ireland has its own Water Supply (Water Fittings) Regulations, made in 2009, whose regulation 4 repeats the appropriate quality and standard, Schedule 2 and workmanlike manner duties almost word for word.

When one tap runs weak and the rest of the house is unchanged, the fault is nearly always in the last half metre of the installation. Flow straighteners and aerators collect scale and grit; a servicing valve left half open after earlier work throttles everything downstream of it; and the narrow flexible tails on a monobloc mixer block far more readily than the copper they replaced. Take the aerator off and run the tap briefly into a bucket: if the flow is suddenly healthy, the restriction was in the outlet, not in the pipework.

When it is the hot side alone that disappoints, the answer usually lies in how the house makes hot water rather than in the tap. A gravity-fed cylinder gives pressure in proportion to the height of the cold water cistern above the outlet, so an upstairs basin is always the weakest point in the house, while an appliance heating water as it flows has to see a certain flow before it fires at all — which is why a mixer that has been throttled down can run cold. Diagnosing that is a plumbing visit, not a cartridge.

Schedule 2 requires every water system to contain an adequate device or devices for preventing backflow of fluid from any appliance, fitting or process, and requires the device used to be appropriate to the highest fluid category to which the fitting is subject downstream. Schedule 1 grades those fluids: category 1 is wholesome water as supplied, category 2 is the same water with its aesthetic quality impaired, category 3 represents a slight health hazard from substances of low toxicity, category 4 a significant hazard from toxic substances, and category 5 a serious health hazard from pathogenic organisms, radioactive or very toxic substances, including anything containing faecal material or other human or animal waste.

A drip on a sound tap is a parts job: a washer and a reseat on a pillar tap, or a cartridge on a ceramic disc or mixer tap. Repair makes sense when the body is solid, the finish is intact and the part is still made, and it is the quickest way to stop water running to waste. Replacement is the better call when the body is cracked or corroded, when the plating has gone, when nobody can identify the cartridge, or when the tap never suited the sink in the first place.

If the tap is being replaced as part of building work on a new dwelling, water efficiency comes into it. Approved Document G sets a standard for new dwellings of 125 litres per person per day of wholesome water, or 110 litres where the optional requirement applies, and its fittings approach lists maximum consumptions including 6 litres per minute for basin taps and 8 litres per minute for sink taps. Those figures govern new dwellings rather than a tap swap in an existing house, but they are a fair description of what a well-chosen modern tap should deliver.

LokalMatch is where the job starts rather than where it is done: you describe the tap, the fault and your postcode once, and plumbers covering that area get in touch, having paid for the request. LokalMatch does not carry out plumbing work, takes no part in setting what a plumber charges, and does not vet, rank or recommend the businesses that reply, so ask each of them what they would check before quoting and whether they hold approved contractor accreditation.