Super low water pressure on cold only?

Scott5OnIt

Hi everyone,

Our bathroom tap since we purchased the house has had almost 0 water pressure when turned to cold. The hot water pressure is extremely high and the cold water isn't affected in the shower in the same bathroom or the kitchen taps downstairs.

Both the hot and cold feeds have isolation valves and have adjusted both to be sure. Is it possible that replacing the tap or perhaps the isolator could fix the problem or is it more complicated than that? Both pipes go behind the bath and are basically impossible to get to without ripping out the whole thing.

Thanks!

neilmcl

Do you have a bath and basin in your bathroom, if so is the pressure bad on both cold taps?

Scott5OnIt

No! The pressure on the bath tap is also unaffected, very powerful

TELLIT01

I assume this is a mixer tap with a single handle which is move left or right for hot or cold. If only cold is affected, and only on that tap, it must be a fault within the mechanism. It's not moving across properly to open up the cold side. You could get a plumber in to try to sort the problem but the quickest and possibly most cost effective solution will be to replace that tap assembly.

neilmcl

Scott5OnIt wrote: »

No! The pressure on the bath tap is also unaffected, very powerful

Well now that we've established it's just the basin tap, is it a mixer or separate cold tap, is it a quarter turn or standard tap?

Rusty_Shackleton

I've had a similar problem since a new boiler was fitted. The previously high pressure cold water in the kitchen is now annoyingly low. Hot water is fine (and noticeably higher pressure than the cold), and the shower/bathroom cold and hot are unaffected.

My heating engineer suggested it could be debris lodged in the cold pipe to the tap

Scott5OnIt

TELLIT01 wrote: »

I assume this is a mixer tap with a single handle which is move left or right for hot or cold. If only cold is affected, and only on that tap, it must be a fault within the mechanism. It's not moving across properly to open up the cold side. You could get a plumber in to try to sort the problem but the quickest and possibly most cost effective solution will be to replace that tap assembly.

neilmcl wrote: »

Well now that we've established it's just the basin tap, is it a mixer or separate cold tap, is it a quarter turn or standard tap?

That's right. Sorry! It's a mixer with a standard single up-down-left-right handle.

My worry is that i'll switch out the whole tap and find it's just a weak supply on the cold water pipe. Is that not likely?

Scott5OnIt

Rusty_Shackleton wrote: »

I've had a similar problem since a new boiler was fitted. The previously high pressure cold water in the kitchen is now annoyingly low. Hot water is fine (and noticeably higher pressure than the cold), and the shower/bathroom cold and hot are unaffected.

My heating engineer suggested it could be debris lodged in the cold pipe to the tap

I don't suppose he made any recommendations as to fixing it? Something that can be flushed down pipe perhaps?

Rusty_Shackleton

Scott5OnIt wrote: »

I don't suppose he made any recommendations as to fixing it? Something that can be flushed down pipe perhaps?

He said about stripping the tap down, but I'm not sure what that entails. It's one of those jobs I keep meaning to do but never get around to, and should really just pay someone to sort out!

neilmcl

Scott5OnIt wrote: »

I don't suppose he made any recommendations as to fixing it? Something that can be flushed down pipe perhaps?

As it's a mixer tap it could be a problem with the ceramic cartridge which you may need to replace. Pretty simple to do, loads of videos on the net.