TL;DR: Moen confirmed they changed their 1222 cartridge in 2022 for “enhanced shower shock protection” which resulted in never having purely cold water go through it. It will always have a mix of hot water so you can never get a fully cold output in the cold position.

I have been struggling with my Moen faucet for months and months on end with 4 different replacement cartridges from Moen customer support and nobody was able to help me. My issue was that turning on from the 6 o clock to 5 o clock position I was getting lukewarm water, then in the 4 o clock position it was slightly cold, then in the 3:30 position it got hot. Tried turning cartridge upside down and everything and it didn’t work. Moen kept thinking it was the cartridge issue and sent 3 replacements and they all had the same issue so they sent a valve. I had to get a contractor to break our new tile to replace the valve and it still didn’t work. Then replaced with a brand new system and new valve and cartridge and still didn’t work. Wasted so much time and money. Moen claimed it was the installer’s fault, not the valve or cartridge that’s causing the issue.

Then I randomly pulled the cartridge from a super old version of the Moen faucet to test and that one worked completely fine. I emailed back Moen to tell them that it’s the cartridge causing the issue and only the newer ones, THEN they finally told me “yeah, we made changes to it in 2022”. See the attached email.

On one hand, finally feels good to know the reason. On the other hand, it sucks that they think this is an “enhancement” and think my lack of cold water is “perceived”. Mind you, the ground water temp here is really cold, not like I’m living in Texas or anything, so that’s BS. Basically Moen is saying “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”.

If you want cold showers, don’t get a Moen product using the 1222 cartridge post-2022.

I have this moen single handle shower valve in all my bathrooms so I've had to replace one of these 1222 cartridges before which was a nightmare for me. It took me all day trying to pry that thing out using Moen's cartridge removal tool. So this time when I had to do another one, I decided to buy the Flowrite ONA cartridge puller so it would be easier. Long story short, it was fine I got the cartridge out quickly, but the back end broke as you can see in the photo and I had to dig that plastic piece out of the valve. I oriented the cartridge as recommended by pointing the notched end upwards before removing, not sure it makes a difference? Is there something I'm doing wrong? Not sure why these always give me trouble, I couldn't imagine being able to pull one of these out without a removal tool of some sort.