How do you remove a flow resrictor from a new price pfister shower head?

Answer 1

It should be in the screen in the end of the spout. Take out the flow restrictor and leave the screen and the base of the flow restrictor.

Further information for Price Pfister kitchen faucet owners: I own a Price Pfister Parisa kitchen faucet which features a pull-out spray head. I assume many of their other models use the exact same setup, so this help might apply to your model as well. It is an excellent faucet with the features I like, and the company has an awesome policy of replacing any part that every breaks on it. BUT...I discovered that there are two flow restrictors on this model, secretly hidden inside both the hot and cold water inlet tubes, right where the supply lines connect to those tubes. The restrictors consist of a star washer and a black rubber washer and tube that's about 3/4" long. After about 6 months of normal use, the hot and cold water flow was very unbalanced: The cold side had normal pressure, but the hot side was weak. What was happening was that the flow restrictor's rubber washer on the hot water side was deteriorating (presumably due to the temperature of the water; mine is about 130 degrees F). This caused two serious water flow problems: First, as the rubber deteriorated, it swelled up and restricted the flow of the hot water side to about 75% or normal. Second, it sent bits of deteriorated black rubber upstream, clogging the pull-out's filter screen. By the way, these flow restrictors are conspicuously *not* shown in the exploded-view parts sheet, and they are not mentioned anywhere in the documentation for the faucet. (Note that I live in California, so possibly these are only used on California models.)

To fix this problem, I first removed the rubber bits off the filter screen in the pull-out sprayer, and I left the sprayer disconnected so I could later flush the lines to prevent re-clogging once I got the system put back together. Next, to find the crazy, undocumented flow restrictors, I turned off both the hot and cold water supply to the faucet, used a crescent wrench to unscrew the supply lines from the faucet, and then peeked up into the faucet's water inlet pipes. I could see the chrome star washer with the rubber restrictor inside each inlet pipe, about 1/2" to 3/4" up into the pipe. I tried but was unable to pull the star washers out with needle-nosed pliers because they are too far inside, so I used a short awl to bend the star washer at its edge, and then was able to yank out the by catching the center of the star washer with the awl and flicking the awl downward toward the open end of the pipe. I repeated this with the cold water inlet, then reconnected the water supply lines and turned on the water. With the pull-out sprayer still disconnect, I ran both the hot and cold water to flush out any remaining rubber washer bits, then reattached the pull-out. The water flow is amazing now...It no longer takes 5 minutes to fill up a bucket of water!