Replacing water filter in French home became a two-month DIY nightmare

A great many articles ago, I explained how I installed a dedicated filtered drinking water tap in the corner of the kitchen sink.

I had bought it from a British company, Doulton, that had been recommended.

It was fiddly to fit in the tight space available but worth the effort.

For a long while it worked well with only minor problems but when the plastic housing developed a crack, I started thinking about switching to a new system.

I am not suggesting there is anything intrinsically wrong with the Doulton brand – the chances are that I was unlucky – and this is not a review of filtration quality.

However, I was attracted to a new entry in the market – Waterdrop – because it seemed to have some great advantages. The system, and the replacement filters, are cheaper than the Doulton ones and it uses steel-braided flexible hoses in standard sizes, rather than plastic ones.

Why my old water filter tap was not compatible

I assumed it would be quick to disassemble the old filter housing and install the new one but there was an issue to resolve first. Would the Waterdrop work with the elegant swan’s neck pillar drinking water tap that had come with my Doulton starter pack? These things must be standard, I reasoned.

I emailed Waterdrop to ask; but they were not very clear about the issue.

Still, I thought I would take the chance to save money.

I went ahead and bought a Waterdrop filter kit without the dedicated tap included. You can guess what happened.

When I opened the box, it was clear that the outlet tube was not going to screw neatly into the base of the Doulton tap which, I discovered too late (I know, I should have checked) ended in a very narrow, non-standard male thread. It did not match any of the pipe sizes stocked by my local plumbers’ merchant.

Waterdrop supplies a range of adapters – 1/2 and 3/8 inch – but even online I could not find a way to make the join.

I emailed the company to see if they could help me solve the problem. They were charming but told me, no, they did not sell taps separately.

At that point, it might have been sensible to order a whole new kit with the tap included, but I did not want to throw away the one I had bought.

I had to accept that there was no option other than to buy a new cold water tap (on the internet) that would receive the new 3/8 Waterdrop hose.

That meant removing the old tap (now redundant, probably never to be used again) and drilling a bigger hole in the sink. Sometimes one has to accept the inevitable.

The hidden reality of DIY plumbing projects

Once I had fitted the new tap, I crawled into the space beneath the sink, in which my wife says I acquire the ability to swear in ways hitherto unknown to human beings.

I removed the Doulton pipework and was hit by another realisation. I would need to reconfigure the whole system to make the Waterdrop unit work – which I did.

I learned a lot I did not know about plumbing in the process.

The moral of the story, I suppose, is that it is very noble and eco-friendly to try to reuse past purchases, but it is not necessarily always possible.

It should have taken me an hour to change from one water filter system to the other; instead it took me the best part of two months.

Do you still want my advice? Here it is. Do not take on any DIY project unless you have lots of patience; understand that it may turn into a process of trial and error which will demand the utmost flexibility.