Plumbing for the Dummy Homeowner, eHow Style

Supply valve

Everyone searches for help on the internet. Even our staff has been known to Google (or occasionally DuckDuckGo) for the solution to a knotty problem or new conundrum. We just hope we find useful information. By useful, we mean informative and on point instead of general and filled with misinformation and/or useless information. Let's say you want to install a new water supply line for a sink, toilet, or other fixture. Would you trust eHow's Giselle Diamond to provide that information? Probably not, once you'd read "How to Replace a Water Supply Valve"¹... 

We've replaced a valve or two at the Antisocial Network world headquarters building, and we know that Giselle makes no sense at all when she starts out by telling her readers in her Step One,

"Valves come in different sizes so measure before buying. It will save you a trip to the hardware store."

 We're curious, Giselle: measure what? and then her Step 2 is 

"...turn the main off to your water supply... It will generally be out of the house at the side or at the back."

We think someone who knows what s/he is doing (Unlike Ms. Diamond) would tell you to turn off the water supply – which probably won't be outside the house unless you live in a warm climate – first, then remove the old valve and take it to the hardware store. That way you don't have to measure some vague quantity, and you can also replace it with the same configuration and type of valve. Of course Giselle's most useless information addresses the hardest part of the task (except maybe crawling backwards into an undersink cabinet) - getting the old valve off. She dismisses that work with a cheery

"Use [a] screwdriver to remove any deposits that may be in the way. Then try and unscrew the whole valve from the pipe with [an] adjustable wrench." "Try and unscrew"? They let you say rubbish like that at eHow? Have you read any more worthless "instructions" lately? We especially like the way she closes them out: "Turn the water back on. Make sure there are no leaks where you put the new valve. If there are any turn the water off and open it to check the leak. Put some more plumbing tape if required. Plumbing tape stops leaks as it is waterproof."

Ummm, we're kinda confused by that ambiguous "open it" - does Giselle mean to disassemble the valve? And we're pretty sure better advice would be to tighten everything, because plumbing tape (by which we assume she means Teflon® tape) isn't used because it's waterproof, it's used because it fills up open spaces within the threads of fittings.


Just another time eHow paid a freelancer to hold forth on a topic about which she knew nothing before "researching" and readers know even less after reading it. The dumbasses at eHow (and their readers) would have been much better served by letting someone who can tell a water supply valve from a hole in the ground write these instructions; not someone like the Dumbass of the Day.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_2337530_replace-water-supply-valve.html

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