I was wrong!

Welcome back to the channel on today’s video. I’ve been called out to a customers house because they’ve got a loud banging humming noise coming from the hot tap on multiple fixtures. It doesn’t matter whether you open up the shower bath taps or basin taps this loud continuous noise happens until the taps are turned off.

This noise is what we class as waterhammer in the Plumbing industry and it’s normally generated from like a ball valve or taps with a washer inside that’s jumping around this echoes all the way through the house especially as on this system it is fed from a Combi boiler, so we have a watermain that goes from downstairs up to the boiler and back out again.

Because this noise is only being generated from the hot tub, I can only assume it’s some sort of pressure issue downstairs. We have the watermain coming up through a cupboard and there is a big brass valve on it. I don’t know what inside whether it’s literally just a piece of brass allowing you to attach drain points to it or if there’s something inside.

My plan is to fit a pressure reducing valve. This will limit the house pressure to 3 bar and also a shock arrestor fitting which is in theory a mini expansion vessel and that should take up any shock or vibrations with pressure issues and stop surgeon so this is my original thought process They might have to further.

I start by removing the old tap and replacing it with a simpler version of it and then we will install a pressure reducing valve above it and because we’re tight for space will have to put a drain point on the horizontal. I’m not too worried about this as it’s still good for maintenance. When you’re doing work on a mains stopped up, we need to isolate the water outside to find your local stop tap out in the road and turn it off. Will open up all the taps in the house as this will drain out fully and then we only have to drain a little bit of water out of the pipework as it is a main drop.

 with everything all cut out I’m gonna take out this old compression socket as it’s just one extra joint to leak in the future and will install the shock arrester there on a solid brass female tee. On the other side where we cut it, I’ll put the drain point and just connect up from the pressure reducing valve with a soldered T in the middle.

The pressure reducing valve has female threats so will make in some new copper irons using some thread locker from gripaloc and some loctite 55 thread. This is just my go to method especially on water mains as I don’t want any problems in the future. The shocker thread I’ve made in using some PTFE tape from a company called blue monster. This is what all the Americans use and I thought I’d give it a try. it’s thicker so requires less wraps than a typical UK tape which you need about 20.

everything all connected up I closed off all the outlets and turned on the tap to only find the noise is still there! With a noise hammering around I just checked the room next-door which was a kitchen and found out that the kitchen sink up inserts were making a horrendous noise and wasn’t causing the tap to shut down properly so I had no option but to change the kitchen sink tap and it may have turned out that this was the issue all along!

Sometimes the simplest and easy things can cause big problems, but I feel what I’ve done on the water main isn’t gonna go to waste as it’s gonna  definitely help with surgeon and reduce pipe banging noises as the system now has somewhere to expand against! Let me know if you had reasons to believe that it wasn’t what I went to head with improving and changing and I’ll always make sure to check everything the next time.

If you’d like today’s Plumbing video, please give it a like a comment down below and please subscribe if you want you if you wanna see more videos like this I’ll see you on the next one.

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