Kitchen Faucets

Kitchen faucets, or taps, come in a wonderful array of styles and designs that can beautify your kitchen. There are any number of companies that offer gorgeous and unusual, faucets for your kitchen sink. A few of these well-known companies are Kohler, Moen, Delta, Pegasus, and Concinnity kitchen faucets.

In kitchens, in the U.S., and in many other places, mixer faucets are often used. This means that the hot and cold water from the two valves is mixed together before reaching the faucet, allowing the water to be any temperature between hot and cold.

For kitchen faucets the mixer faucets, also called ‘taps’, sometimes have some sort of pressure balancing feature so that the hot/cold mixture of water will not be affected by someone else turning on a water faucet in another part of the house. This helps avoid scalding or a surge of cold water as other water loads happen, like flushing a toilet for example.

Sometimes instead of using two separate valves, mixer faucets, or taps, will use a single valve whose handle moves up and down to control the water flow and from side to side to control the temperature of the water. Mixer taps are more difficult to use in the British Isles than in other countries because traditional British plumbing gives hot and cold water at different pressures.

If two taps are used, it may not be real obvious which tap is hot and which is cold. In most places a red mark of some sort will indicate the hot tap, and the cold tap usually has a blue or even a green indicator mark. In many of the English-speaking countries, the kitchen faucet taps are also labeled with an "H" for hot water or a "C" for cold water. Mixer kitchen faucet taps may have a red and blue stripe or arrows indicating which side is hot and which is cold.

In some countries there is a usual or 'standard' arrangement of hot and cold taps. For example in the United States and Canada, the hot tap is on the left and the cold water tap is on the right side. This is a usual building code requirement. This convention usually applies in the UK too, but many times these installations are reversed. With Moen faucets, this can be easily fixed by removing the handle and rotating the valve stem 180 degrees.

Picking a kitchen faucet is the hardest part of putting in a new faucet because there are so many beautiful choices to pick from! Have fun!