Changing A Shower Head

Any home repair job involving plumbing can be a little intimidating. But it can often be a lot simpler repair than you think. With a little coaching and encouragement...

Replacing a shower head is easy to do. Now, even though we're going to consider this an old one, we might want to use it someplace else sometime in the future, so we're going to protect if with a towel or some masking tape.

Once you get the thing started, I think you can take it off by hand. And you don't want to put too much pressure on there; you might break this little goose neck off, and then you've got another problem. This one's going to come off pretty easily, though. And then the next thing you want to do is to put some Teflon tape -- it's not a tape that sticks, but you get a little bit of that off of there, and you just put it around the threads. And this is going to seal against having any kind of leaks around this connection up here. You can also use some stuff called plumber's putty, but this is a lot neater and works just fine.

Now we're going to take our new shower head, and we're going to start it on by hand. Now you want to run it up as far as you can by hand. Get it as snug as you can, and then use the wrench for the last couple of turns to make sure it's on there real good. In this particular case, we've got flat surfaces down here, so we don't even need to put any kind of protection on there to protect that metal. Now, it's on good and tight. And just that easy, we have a brand new shower head. And, incidentally, you can get a low-flow shower head that will help you save some money. Remember the Teflon tape; it really does help -- no leaks!