The water supplied to city apartments is in most cases far from ideal and unsuitable for drinking or cooking. There are two ways to solve this problem: purchasing drinking water from special suppliers or treating tap water on site. Recently, apartment owners increasingly prefer the second method, installing various cleaning systems in apartments. Kitchen faucet with water filter allows you to organically fit them into the overall interior of the kitchen.
Advantages and disadvantages of combined mixers
In most cases drinking water treatment systems placed in a niche under the sink. This allows you to provide free access, necessary for the periodic replacement of cartridges, and hide the filter unit itself. Usually in this case, a separate faucet is installed on the sink, connected to a water filter. This is not always the best solution:
- The second kitchen faucet very rarely fits organically into the overall interior of the sink. Often it looks there as a kind of foreign body.
- To install it, you need to make an additional hole in the countertop, which is not always possible.
- The drinking water faucet connected to the filter takes up part of the working space of the sink, which leads to various inconveniences when using it.
These inconveniences can be completely avoided if you choose a combined faucet with a tap for drinking water for the kitchen. This plumbing device is designed in such a way that the filtered stream is fed through the same spout as raw water, but through an independent channel.
Thus, the advantages of this type of plumbing include:
- Saving space in the kitchen. With the modest dimensions of the kitchen, this factor plays an important role.
- Ease of installation. After installing the cleaning system, there is no need to drill anything: one mixer simply changes to another.
- Original and beautiful design. Many models of kitchen faucets with a tap for drinking water are made in high-tech style, but you can also choose classic options.
Naturally, no product can be perfect. And combined mixers have their drawbacks:
- They have a more complex design and a larger number of different movable elements, which could not but lead to some loss of reliability to classical models.
- The main disadvantage that restrains the demand for combined models is their high cost. Not everyone is ready to shell out more than 6 thousand rubles for a combined kitchen faucet with a filter.
Types of combined mixers
Like classic models, combined ones are divided into two types by design:
- Lever. To supply drinking water, they have an additional lever, which can be located on the front or side surface of the tap.
- Valve. This option is less convenient - access to the tap in the front will be difficult if you need to fill a large container with clean water.
The spout of the combination faucet can have one or two openings for water supply.
The material used in the production of these products can be different: you can find mixers made of bronze, stainless steel, brass, plastic or ceramics. This diversity has led to a huge selection of many combinations. Spraying non-ferrous metals such as chrome or nickel allows manufacturers to produce faucets of different styles and even use the effect of artificial aging.
From a hygienic point of view, nickel-plated or chrome-plated components are preferable, as they do not allow dirt to accumulate on the surface.Yes, and such plumbing devices always look beautiful and fresh.
Selection rules
The convenience of using the sink in the kitchen will largely depend on how competently the combined mixer was chosen. What should be paid special attention to here?
- Product quality. A combination mixer is a rather complex mechanism, so it is necessary to check how well its parts fit together, if there are any visible damage on them.
- Convenience. The location of the controls should not cause difficulties when using the device. Right in the store, you can present your sink and evaluate whether it will be convenient to use the valves or levers of a particular model.
- Taps with a swivel bend are the most convenient to use. They are the only option if more than one sink is used in the kitchen.
- The height of the spout depends on the depth of the sink. The smaller it is, the greater the height of the mixer spout should be. Otherwise, it will be simply impossible to draw water into a tall dish.
- As always, when choosing, it is better to give preference to well-known companies whose product quality is beyond doubt.
Installation
Installing a combination faucet is unlikely to cause any special problems, even if you do it yourself, with a minimum of repair skills:
- The water supply to the sink is shut off. In most apartments, stopcocks are located in the toilet. After that, to let the residues drain, just open the mixer in the kitchen.
- The old crane is dismantled. Old hoses stuck to it can simply be cut off, after which they can be easily disconnected from the pipes. The lock nut is unscrewed, and then the old mixer with hose clippings is removed from above.
- The place for attaching a new assembly is cleaned and degreased. After a long period of use, the surface around the hole in the countertop under the old faucet can look very unsightly.
- A combined faucet is installed and connected with rubber hoses included in the kit to the water supply and cleaning system.
Screw the hoses carefully: excessive tightening can lead to damage to the seal, and insufficient tightening can lead to leaks or knocking out of the nipples. In addition, it is important not to confuse which channel the purified water will be supplied to, and which one must be connected to the water supply.
World-wide fame and a good reputation in the market of combined mixers was acquired by the products of European companies: Czech ZorgSanitary, German Kaiser and Blanko. Their products are of excellent quality, durability and beauty. True, these characteristics are combined with considerable cost. So, when choosing a combined mixer, there is no need to rush: it is important to think over and evaluate everything, read reviews, and only then go to a hardware store.
