American Standard Faucets

We bought our house about eight years ago from an architect that actually built it for himself. He'd just gotten divorced and built this great house, but then got re-married to an interior decorator who liked her own house better. Pretty funny.

Anyways, he put these nice American Standard faucets all over the house. The one in the bathroom next to my office started leaking a couple of months ago, and finally it got too bad to ignore (which is saying a lot --- I'm very good at ignoring).

Thanks to my wife's impressive Google skills, we found the model and schematics on the web. When I took the faucet apart, it became clear what was wrong. The cartridge in the faucet has these ceramic pieces that slide together and apart to turn the water off and on, and a big shard had broken off of one of them. I actually found the shard stuck in the flow control valve down at the bottom of the faucet, which explained why the water flow had dropped off at the same time the leak started.

Here's the cool thing --- I called American Standard and they said, "ok, we'll send out new cartridges." No messing around, just a quick and easy no-hassle fix. I got the parts in the mail within a few days and now my bathroom is as good as new.

In a world where my expectation is that every warranty/service interaction is going to be painful, this was incredibly refreshing. You can be sure I'll be buying from these guys again. Very cool!