Best Video | Correct Way To Adjust Your Home Water Pressure | Fix Your Low Water Pressure

Welcome back guys, it's the Tightwad. We've had some issues with water pressure in our house being too low, so today I'm going to show you how to safely adjust the water pressure in your home. You're only going to need two or three different things today to get this job done. So one is an adjustable wrench, you might need a flathead screwdriver to adjust the PRV, and then you're going to need an air pressure gauge. I'll make sure I have links to these three things in the description in my Amazon storefront, so you can buy them or you could pick them up at any home improvement store. The first thing you're going to need to do is take your water pressure gauge and connect it to a hose bib or spigot, as they call it some places, on the outside of your home. I'm actually going to connect it to two different ones today because one of my hose bibs is unregulated, meaning I get the full pressure that the county is providing, and then the other one is behind the PRV, which is a regulated pressure that tells me the current pressure of my home's water system. I've mounted it to my non-regulated spigot, and you can see I have about 70 to 75 psi. Always check two different spigots on your home. This is one that is actually regulated. You can see there's a drastic difference in the water pressure being allowed in. I want to first explain how the water system in my home works. So this is the water main coming from my meter outside. It comes in and comes to this main cutoff. So this is the main water cutoff that is inside the basement of my home. I could also cut it off at the street if I need to, but this one's a lot easier to access. It then comes up here and it splits off to an outside spigot or hose bib mounted on the front of my house. You can see it goes up and goes out that way. So this is an unregulated hose bib or spigot. The hose bib on this line will allow me to check which pressure the county is providing to my home. When we follow this pipe up a little more, we'll see this device. It's got a pressure regulator or a pressure reducing valve. This is adjusted by loosening the nut here and screwing this clockwise or righty-tighty to increase the water pressure allowed in your home or left counterclockwise to decrease the pressure allowed in your home. I have the water pressure gauge attached to a regulated hose bib outside my home so I can monitor the pressure as I make adjustments. So we're going to start by adjusting the PRV. Typically I would need a wrench to loosen this nut, but it's apparently already loose. And I also need a screwdriver to tighten it down. Most fixtures in a home are not rated to take more than 80 pounds of pressure, and the recommended pressure for most homes is 60 to 65 pounds, so that's what we're shooting for today. You can see I have this one dialed in around 60 to 65 psi, so now we need to adjust the expansion tank to match. Once you have the pressure adjusted to the setting you desire, you should tighten down this nut, and I'm going to get a wrench and make sure it's nice and secure. Guys, I can't stress this enough. Many videos on YouTube show you the improper way to check your expansion tank and to feel the pressure. I'm going to show you the correct way to do it, and make sure you do this so that your water system works efficiently, and this doesn't degrade quicker than it should. On the bottom of this, there's simply a plastic cover that unscrews. That reveals this valve stem, which is common to see on bicycle tires, lawnmower tires, or automobile tires. We're going to check the pressure in our tank, but first, to do that, we need to turn off the main cutoff valve for our home, and drain all the water using the spigot outside. The purpose of this system is whenever the water expands from being heated in the water heater, it can overflow into here because we have a closed system. It has no way to get back through these valves into the main water system. So this has a diaphragm inside that takes up about half of the tank, and we need to make sure that the PSI in that diaphragm matches the PSI in our water system. This is just a standard air gauge, and you can see my air pressure is very low in here. It should have been around 40 PSI, so I'm going to take an air chuck connected to a compressor, and I'm going to put some air in here. If you don't have an air compressor, you can use a bicycle pump also. I continued adding small amounts of air to the tank until I got up to 65 pounds of pressure. Now I just need to screw the protective plastic cap back onto the valve stem so it doesn't get damaged. With all that done, it's time to enjoy the new water pressure as I water the garden. If you have any questions, make sure you leave them in the comments section. I always take time to reply. Thank you so much for making it to the end of the video. It'd be awesome if you'd click that logo in the bottom left-hand corner to subscribe to my channel, and maybe even check out one of my other videos shown on the right. As always, I hope you guys have a great day.