How to replace shower fixtures?

Sources

4 Types of Shower Valve Assembly Installations - YouTube

www.youtube.com

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1

How To Repair & Replace A Shower Faucet Valve (Easy DIY Fix)

www.youtube.com

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2

DIY: Install a Shower Head & Hand Shower | Delta Faucet Blog

www.deltafaucet.com

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3

DIY How to Install a Shower Valve using Pex Plumbing - YouTube

www.youtube.com

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4

Answer

Video Full Text

• 00:00 - Hello, my fellow DIY remodelers! Jeff here again today and we're doing the finishing touches on this bathroom here, and we have this little faucet here. We're going to be changing. This trim kit out here 'cause this is old and nasty and this is all the original from when this place was built in the 1970s. Sometimes, if you're looking at your trim kit and you're wondering, well, if I wanna replace it, how do I know what brand this is? Sometimes you can just snap a picture of your trim kit there and post it on the plumbing forums and somebody. There will know who it is. Sometimes, you can just search on Google Images and look at all. The different shower trim kits that are on there and that'll help you identify 'em. But anyway, in this case, we know what we've got so anyway, they're all just assembled essentially the same way. There's only so many ways you can attach a shower handle and a trim kit. So what I'm gonna do is go right in here with my screwdriver and flip this off. Okay. And then that will reveal inside the middle there a flat-head screw. So I just happen to have a flat-head screwdriver here handy with me and we're gonna unscrew this. And once we've unscrewed that sufficiently enough, you should be able to pull your handle off. So that will now reveal your other two screws there that you need to unscrew to get off your trim plate and then pull that sleeve out. Most of the trim kits that you buy come with this and the sleeve and a brand new handle. Sometimes, the handles might look slightly different but whatever handle you get, you gotta make sure it will fit onto your stem right there for the shower valve.

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• 02:17 Now let's say, if you're doing your remodeling here, this is usually a good time to go ahead and pull out that cartridge and change it now. Let me remind you, you gotta make sure your water is off before you're doing this because sometimes, people could put something together not quite right and then put that final clip in or whatever that holds the valve in and it can come shooting out with all the water. And if you're in a condo, where now you gotta go try to find where is the water cutoff for your building, now you're in big trouble. So it's always a good idea to cut off that water first. Don't ever try to pull that cartridge out without having your water off and without testing. It first to make sure that there's no water coming out of here, okay? Okay, so I've pulled off the sleeve there. Now, if you look real close, you'll see that looks like a horseshoe clip. That's coming on either side of the stem there and the top of it is here. So once you cut off the water, when you turn off the main water to your house, you would use a pair of pliers and pull this clip straight up 'cause that clip is what's retaining it in place under pressure. It's under whatever, your 60 pounds of pressure PSI of water pressure is behind that. If you were to pull that clip up right now and you didn't turn off the water. First, you're gonna get a gusher and guess what, no human is strong enough to push the valve back in there and get that clip in there either. So you'll really need to get that water off first if you're gonna do that and change that cartridge. Okay, so now we're gonna unscrew. These two screws to remove that plate. Now also, before we take off the plate, we need to cut all of the caulk that they put around this thing. You have to slice that first before you can get the plate off. Alright, well guess what?

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• 04:14 Upon closer examination of the discussion plates, it says right there, this is a Moen. And I thought it looked like a Moen because I've done a few Moens in the past and typical signature of a Moen. Is we see. These two on the bottom here and a notch on the top. That's typical of the older, I would say this is probably their Chateau Series from back in the '70s or '80s, most likely the '70s. Alright. And here's the other way we tell is after we've pulled off this guy, the sleeve and the escutcheon plate, and we look real close. In there, you can see inside there... Now, you can see that is what it looks like inside the hole balancer right. There, the mixing valve. If you were to buy a whole new shower mixing valve and everything and the shower head and all that stuff as a kit, normally, you'd have to have a plumber come in and there's four pipes. These are three or four pipes here soldered in that you can see all the way around that. The plumber would have to come in, maybe open this hole up a little more and he'd have to unsolder everything there and then solder in the new mixing valve. So now you can have a much more modern, hopefully more improved shower valve than what the builder gave you 'cause the builders usually give us just garbage. Total, total garbage, the cheapest of the cheap. But anyway, so in this case here, what we're going to do is just put our brand. New trim kit in. So we're gonna go and see, sometimes your Home Depot and your Lowe's doesn't have these older things. They may have a replacement that's close but the important thing for you to look for here is that hole pattern. You see those two screws and that keyed hole on the middle there? Those are the things you need to look for. Because see, those two screws, they mount right there. See the two holes right there under the valve? That's where those two screws go for. And that slot that you see here and the ring here, that slot, what it does is. It fits over the top of that retaining clip. See it right there, it's just barely sticking up a little bit? But it's enough that it needs a keyed hole here. So that's what makes this specific.

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• 06:55 You don't just go to Home Depot and buy a universal fit. Don't ever buy anything that says universal because there is no one-size-fits-all, especially for showers and trim kits because of the propriety nature of these designs and everything. So this is only gonna fit one, see. And if they don't, then what you do is you take your kit and everything, you take a couple pictures of it and you send it to one of your local plumbing supplies. You can Google plumbing supply, your county, wherever your county is, and it will come up with a list of local places that you can start calling to see if they carry a newer version of this trim kit and then the tub spout that matches. Now, to remove the tub spout, normally, if you look underneath, there's a set screw that you have to undo. But in this case, we don't have any set screws here. So what I'm suspecting is that this was a screw-on type, meaning that there's a threaded, some type of threaded device inside on the pipe. So we're going to cut the caulk with our utility knife. Here, we're gonna slice all the way around here and we're going to loosen up all that caulk and see if we can unscrew this. Hey, by the way, I wanna show you something stupid that I wanna make sure you never do. What do you see wrong here with this picture here? Do you see anything wrong in there when you look at here and when you look right there? Well, what we see wrong here, and this is something. I tell people when you're caulking your trim kits, never caulk on the bottom. This guy caulked all the way around. You can see he caulked all the way around the edge. You always leave like an inch on the bottom where it's not caulked because should water ever somehow find. It's way back in there and it needs an exit, that's where it would come out. So same here in the bottom of the tub spout, he should never have caulked all the way. I had to dig and dig and dig to get it undone there. You should always leave it on the bottom uncaulked so that if water gets inside there, it can drip out the bottom. That's bad form to do it the way these guys did. Some people, they just don't think when they do stuff. It's just amazing.

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• 09:08 This would be a perfect time if you haven't already, to hit that subscribe button down below. And once you hit that subscribe button, you'll see that little gray bell. Click on that and that will alert you to every time. We put a new video so that you'll never miss a video. And also, if you like our video here, you can click on the thumbs up button down below. That lets us know that you like us. Any questions you have, please enter them in the comments down below, too. Yup, see, I was right! This is one of those threaded types. So they had the copper pipe coming out here with the Teflon tape on the threads properly. Like you should have it and then this just screws right on to it. So this is the other thing you gotta make sure of. When you get the tub spout, and hopefully you can get it all as one kit so you're making sure you're getting the right thing here, but whatever tub spout you get, you gotta make sure that this is the proper length because this thing is set and it's fixed. This can't be adjusted without you having to bring out a torch and change it, you'd have to cut the pipe and put on a new adapter here and all that. So whatever one you fit in there, it's gotta be exact. So you measure this distance here and then check on the package and make sure that that's the distance that whatever spout you buy, that's the distance it requires to have. So essentially, you wanna stick your tape measure down in there and see how far it is until you meet the threaded hole, that screw down there, and that's what you gotta look for on the one that you buy, that it's exactly the same distance. So that's another crucial point. Otherwise, you'll end up screwing this thing and you can end up short of the wall. You'll end up like this, going, hey, wait a minute, I'm in all the way, what's going on? So that's another engineering disaster that can beset you. You can see what a joke of a tiling job. These guys did when they tiled this originally. Probably better to just put all the tiles in and then drill a hole, a one-inch hole or something around it. That's typically what we do. This is why I don't like these one-inch tiles. I do 12 by 24 tiles and I just drill a hole in the middle with a tile saw and everything just comes out perfectly there. And we also use KERDI Membrane gaskets behind it before we tile so that this copper pipe is normally poking straight out through the rubber gaskets so that water can't get back in and go inside the wall. By the way, one other thing here, we opened up the wall here where we took the plate off, we can smell cigarette smoke coming out of there, just is brutal. That's because right next door is the lady that smokes like a chimney and we have a link that I'll put down in the description to another video. We did that we showed how we completely had to seal off this whole end of the house to keep the smoke coming in from her unit. So pretty expensive and labor-consuming engineering failure to have to deal with but it has to be dealt with.

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• 12:36 Here, I turned on the light for you. So you see that clip? There's a clip that comes down, it's a U-shaped clip. That's right here on the top. I'm not gonna pull it out because obviously the water would shoot out at me. But that's very indicative of the Moens. They have this. And that's why you have that notch. See that little notch out, sticking in? That's why you have that hole here in the escutcheon plate because the plate and the sleeve fit over the top of that little notch. So that's pretty much how you tell it's a Moen. Alright now, I wanted to show you this. This is the new tub/shower trim kit that we got from the store. Yeah, these are cheap, it's plastic. If you wanna go pay $100 for the Moen, go ahead, that's fine too. So anyway, what's cool about this one is we look for that hole pattern that we know is exactly what we're looking for. The two holes at the bottom right. Here, the two screw holes plus the notch right there on the top of the hole. And this kit is interesting because it comes with a couple of other center hub plates. In case your hole pattern is different. What if you have a Moen that's like that where your screws are diagonally across from each other instead of along the bottom? Well, this one, this center hook here would pop out and this one would go in. And they have another pattern too, very similar, a little bit bigger notch up on the top. So this one plate will actually handle several different series of Moen showers here. And they come with a couple of different adaptor pieces in there and this rubber gasket that goes behind the plate and it pushes against the wall and it prevents any water from getting inside behind this thing. '. Cause you know, when you shower, let's say this is against your shower wall, when you shower, water can get behind this unless you seal it. When I'm done, I always brought a bead of silicone around the edge, okay? And the kit also comes with a clear plastic handle or a metal handle. You can use either one. And I always go with a metal one 'cause it looks a lot classier, even though a brand new one with the plastic acrylic ones. Here, the knobs, it's still much pretty decent compared to the yellow one that you're pulling off; however, the metal one looks more modern and it just looks a lot nicer looking, a lot classier looking. So we're going to go ahead and get this installed on there now. So we have the gasket in place on the back of the escutcheon plate. And now, we're going to put the escutcheon plate back on.

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• 15:11 And remember, the notch goes up to match the notch up. That's sticking right up there, the clip. Alright, so you just slide it right on there. And now, it's just a matter of taking your two screws and aligning them to the screw holes that are way back in there and screw it into place. Okay, so now we have it all tightened in. Now, we can insert the sleeve into the center hub. Now, the package comes with two different sized sleeves, the smaller one and the larger one. We, of course, are using the smaller one and it just slides right in there. Remember, it's keyed and you push it straight back to where it stops, and there you have it. And then we'll put the handle on. The only issue here is now by going for this fancier handle, you traded off simplicity of installation with a little bit more complexity. So here's the regular handle, similar to the one we pulled up and you just pop the cap, put the handle on, and there's a screw that goes right through the middle end of the spindle. But with the handle, that's a little different because there's no hole on the front, right? So what they do with these, this gets attached on to the spindle on the front of the shower faucet there. And once this is in place, and it'll be sitting like this, then the handle will fit over that adaptor piece there and we can screw it in from underneath. So you would have little set hole screw holes right there. So we'll put the screw in there and attach it with that Allen wrench which is included with the set. Okay, so now we've tightened the adaptor onto the front of the spindle there. And now, we'll put the handle onto here and run a set screw in. And the set screw will go through the handle and into that little hole right there. So we just need to make sure whether we have the right one because there's two of these that come in the kit and each one has a different range of motion. So we'll see which one of these does the correct range of motion for us once we get it connected. If this one is not right, then we'll switch over to the other one. So now, here's the handle and you see that vertical slot there on the right-hand side, that has to coincide with that vertical standoff right there. So we'll put it in like that and you'll see. It goes all the way in, and that will run the set screw into that hole right there. So here, we've put the handle on and there's your set screw right there that we've started and we're going to tighten it with this Allen wrench that came with a set. And there's the final product right there. So what started out as an old, ugly pull knob shower here has turned into something a lot classier-looking. Then next, we'll upgrade the tub spout and we'll get rid of this ugly, old shower head up here. We'll do that in another video. We're going to replace this with a massaging shower head.

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• 18:17 So anyway, if you found this video useful, we'd appreciate if you'd give us a thumbs up down below and don't forget to subscribe to our channel so that you could come back and check out. Many many, more videos that we've uploaded to help you solve your engineering issues. And when you click on the subscribe button, don't forget to hit the bell icon next to it that will alert you every time we upload a new video. Well, that's it for this week, folks! And we'll see you on the next video. Have a great one!

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