Maintenance at my apartment complex replaced the shower faucet, knob, and cartridge. My water pressure in that shower went from great to barely there. They sent another maintenance man to fix it, but all he did was put another new cartridge in, and the water pressure is now even worse, pretty much unusable. They sent him back once more, but he insisted there was nothing wrong with it, and made no attempt to fix it.

The pressure does increase some whenever I turn the temperature to either all hot or all cold, but is still lower than it used to be, and I can't take a shower at either of those temperature settings.

The pressure is low from both the faucet & the shower head.

We checked the water stops, and both are open all the way.

We turned the water on with no cartridge installed, and the water came through the faucet perfectly fine, so there doesn't seem to be any blockage there. But as soon as the cartridge is back in, the water is just cut off almost entirely.

The cartridge looks like this: [www.plumbingsupply.com].
It does have one more gold ring, which is loose/not actually attached to it.

Strange, because that cartridge is as "dumb" as they come so there should be NOTHING inside it to cause ANY water flow problems. About the only thing that might cause it would be if the stem's washer is not opening far enough to allow full flow.

Why was this maintenance done in the first place? Maybe you can get the old cartridge that was in there before the work was done and reinstall it?

The brand of the shower valve is Mixet? Maybe the maintenance dept used a "generic" cartridge instead of the manufacturers recommended one? If this work has been done to other apartments are they having a similar problem? If you think they used the wrong cartridge, or for some reason the cartridge is bad, and you can't get the maintenance folks to fix it for you then you could change the cartridge yourself:

[www.thespruce.com]


Is this (below) similar to the cartridge that was installed?





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