Sometimes the best way to tell a story is by starting at the end. The "ending" in this case, involved me reenacting my best fist-pump a la Tiger Woods circa mid-2000s (disclaimer: not a promotion of TW or his questionable life choices) in the laundry room while my husband stood nearby holding the baby with a bemused look on his face.
Now for the beginning: I think I am not alone in saying that I take pleasure in small victories. Finding a couple bucks in a pocket of a coat not worn since last winter, taking the cookies out of the oven right when the edges are crispy and the center is gooey, spending a beautiful summer night outdoors without a mosquito bite (not impossible but quite improbable), etc etc. However, I think that my husband derives great amusement in watching just how much I enjoy small engineering victories... or maybe just because of the scale in which I choose to celebrate them. In this instance, I was reveling in a triumph over suboptimal washer performance. When we moved into our home we made the economical and responsible choice of purchasing high-efficiency washer and dryers. (Aside: after observing many cycles I am still suspicious that the clothes are more likely than not spending 45 minutes being damp rather than actually getting clean). Our home is older, built in the mid-1950s and has pipes to match. For the first few months we lived in the house, we were treated to loud banging sounds in the floor with every washer cycle. It was inconvenient at worst, and mostly just prevented us from running the wash during the baby's nap time. I chocked it up to the old pipes and decided it wasn't worth the stress of crawling around under the house to add extra clamps to dampen the sound.
I likely would have left it at that, if not for a brief flashback that hit me just as i was running a load of towels last week. The sounds were amplified over previous iterations and I finally went down into the basement to check it out, paranoid that the problem left untreated was about to bite me in the ass in the form of a burst pipe. As I was swatting away the cobwebs and avoiding touching the multitude of daddy longlegs, I saw the cold water pipe at the entry point to the house shuddering periodically as the washer tub was filling in the laundry room. The *chunk* *chunk* *chunk* sound was rattling dangerously through the pipes and vibrating the copper down the length of the house. I groaned and muttered to myself about poor construction, blaming my current state of affairs on the original builders of the house and ignoring my neglectful participation in the issue for the past six months. Previously, I did my best to ignore the sound of the pipes, but now I listened. And then, out of the blue, a veritable lightbulb (or LED for the energy conscious) lit up above my head, and I knew the problem AND the solution!
In grad school I worked on running various water lines in the lab, both big and small, mostly for the cooling the externalities of the various ultra-high vacuum parts. Standard operating procedures (SOP) reminded us to take care in avoiding the generation of water hammers, whose pressure could disastrously damage the more delicate parts and potentially even "fish tank" the system (that's pretty much the worst case scenario for a vacuum system maintaining ~1E-12 Torr). That type of disaster is what motivated some very specific SOPs in how to properly open and close water flow. The times in which they were accidentally (or delinquently) ignored, you could hear the *chunk* sound of the water pushing through suddenly. And that was it. A water hammer.
High-efficiency machines don't fill continuously like old standard systems. Rather, they pulse water as the barrel rolls* and this causes the water to quickly turn on and off, hence the water hammers. Once I knew what it was, the solution was easy. A $10 water hammer arrestor from your local friendly hardware store or Amazon can be installed on the machine side of the hot and cold water sources and will dampen the effects. The installation was only stressful because I was trying to get a wrench to the back of the machine while squeezed tightly in between the washer and the utility sink that I love so much. (Side note: utility sinks are invaluable when raising a baby whose impressive bowels frequently overwhelm her diaper and make a mess of everything). Ten minutes later I checked the lines for leaks and ran a test wash. There is still a slight vibration at the lines, but the hammer is almost entirely dampened. Amazing.
Full circle, now I'm celebrating with a perfectly executed fist-pump, and my husband is watching this happen. Sometimes small instances of good problem solving, using built-up knowledge and intuition, can be the most rewarding. It is with enormous pride that I am able to look at a problem I fixed and say that I am an engineer. We are a strange group, but we love what we do.
*do a barrel roll!
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