Water Hammer Isn't Normal!
Folks get used to hearing it. "It's steam," they say. "It's supposed to be noisy."
No it's not.
A proper steam system is as quiet as a hot water system. You can make the water hammer go away- once you understand what causes it. Things don't "just happen." There is always a cause. Find it.
really didn't expect a book about steam heating maintenance to hit me weirdly hard, and yet, here we are
Legit thought this was the opening to a chapter in a Discworld novel
gonna see if I can ILL this out of some dark corner of an industrial library brb
reminds me of some video i saw ages ago about how the aeronautics industry treats mishaps like plane crashes and how the medical industry treats mishaps like MRSA infections. in that the aeronautics industry takes plane crashes very seriously and sees them as entirely unacceptable, and the medical industry treats MRSA like an inevitability that simply isn't worth trying to stop. idk if the comparison was really 1-to-1, but yeah.
oh yes there was an excellent series of essays a few years back comparing how aviation and healthcare have handled alert fatigue, normalization of deviance, and a few other well-documented phenomena that lead to safety issues.
alas, the computer industry is more like healthcare than like aviation........
no, yeah, wow that is definitely highly relevant to things in the software domain
tldr: sometimes, in two pipe systems, it's caused by a faulty steam trap which isn't allowing condensate to flow out of the radiator, and that's an easy fix, or that the radiator isn't at a proper tilt to let out condensate. but if those aren't the cause, it implies that there is something wrong with the piping, such as a pipe which has bent down and pooled condensate. this sort of problem is more involved to fix, involving replacing or sometimes entirely re-angling a pipe
there are a lot of different factors which go into determining what is causing your water hammer and the book this is from (The Lost Art of Steam Heating, by Dan Holohan) covers a lot of them in more detail
ours only started happening when we got a bout of particularly cold weather and returned to normal once the weather returned to normal
