Plumber question - kitchen faucet

[Haertig]

I have a single handle kitchen faucet that just stopped working. No water. Not a trickle - no water period. Then after a bit, it works fine - full water pressure, temperature adjustability, everything. And then later - zero water again, no even a drip. Sometimes you turn it on and you get a brief sub-second spurt of water, then it's off. This started about three days ago. Rare at first. Now it is mostly off and unusable. Every other faucet in the house works fine, so it's not an incoming water pressure issue.

The faucet was one of those semi-fancy ones that has a photo sensor that turns the water on automatically when you put your hands under the faucet. But we haven't used that feature for years. That sensor stuff failed very early in the faucets life. There is a screw on the under-sink controller that you can turn 90 degrees to bypass the auto functions, and that has been in bypass mode for a few years. We have been using it as a normal faucet in full manual mode for a long time.

The auto controller has batteries in it, and I replaced the batteries just in case there was still some electrical function needed to make the faucet work in manual mode. That did not help. So I took the batteries totally out and the faucet worked (for one or two tries) totally without batteries - so that proves batteries are not needed in manual mode.

I initially thought debris or some other blockage but this is a "no water at all, not even a drop" or "works perfectly" thing. I am not dealing with low flow or a trickle which I would assume leans more towards debris. It either works 100% or it works 0%.

Any suggestions on what to try short of a complete faucet replacement?

 

[zoomzoom]

Hmmmm. I'd turn off the water and disassemble the unit where the water handle is to check for debris, broken part or otherwise.

What's the name brand? Delta, Moen, (I think Kohler) have lifetime warranties. They'll send you a new one quickly. Just call customer service. They may want a picture of it to confirm it's theirs.

 

[Caribou]

I’d expect that the internal valve is shutting. You might be able to remove it but I think Zoom has your answer.

 

[Haertig]

I’d expect that the internal valve is shutting. You might be able to remove it but I think Zoom has your answer.

You nailed it. The faucet is working now - let's hope it keeps working.

I removed the thing below from the water line and everything works now. This thing was set to "bypass", but it was intermittently bypassing and not-bypassing it seems. I don't know how it was flipping between the two operations - since I had removed the batteries from it. The one thing that Kohler did right (since they are unable to make a faucet controller that works!) is they made all the connections and hoses with quick-connects on them and I was able to snap out this controller and the two ends of the hose that remained snapped right together - they had the proper quick connects on them. So no trip to the hardware store as I expected.

In bypass mode, I was expecting to find zero resistance in this thing, since it should be effectively a straight pipe in that mode. But I could barely blow air through it - whether in bypass mode of not. Hmmm... that doesn't sound right to me. The connectors into and out of this thing have little screen filters in them and neither of those were clogged or had any visible debris at all. So there must be some internal valve that went crazy and was maybe flipping open/closed on it's own driven by water flow/pressure.