Awful vibrating water pipes. Help!

[Ari]

I have an old (fifties) house and every time it gets cold outside in winter I get terrible vibrations running through the water pipes when I run hot water for any length of time.

Weirdly, if I run the cold tap it stops, and in the summer that's it, but in the winter as soon as I stop running the cold tap it starts up again.

It doesn't do it if I take a shower, but tonight I decided to run a bath, and the noise was terrible and really concerns me that it's going to shake something loose and I'm going to have a bad water leak in a wall somewhere. I tried the running the cold tap trick but every time I stopped it the noise came back and eventually I just had to let it run its course, about 10 minutes of shaking and vibrating.

I'm really bothered about this, any idea what it is, and more importantly, how it can be fixed?

Edited by Ari on Wednesday 8th December 22:00

[ferg]

Sounds like water hammer. Badly clipped pipes normally. High pressure doesn't help. You could fit a shock arrestor on the pipework if clipping it fails.

[Ricky_M]

I'm assuming you have an open-vented hot water cylinder with a storage tank to feed it?

It could possibly be the float valve in the storage tank which is causing the noise. Next time you here the noise pop up into the loft and investigate.

If you don't have this set-up, it is most likely to be what Ferg said.

[Google [bot]]

Change all the tap washers.

[Ari]

Ricky_M said:

I'm assuming you have an open-vented hot water cylinder with a storage tank to feed it?

It could possibly be the float valve in the storage tank which is causing the noise. Next time you here the noise pop up into the loft and investigate.

If you don't have this set-up, it is most likely to be what Ferg said.

I think the plumbing hp as you describe. If it is this, what's the fix?

[Ari]

ferg said:

Sounds like water hammer. Badly clipped pipes normally. High pressure doesn't help. You could fit a shock arrestor on the pipework if clipping it fails.

Interesting, thanks. Where does it go and is it an expensive job?

[GingerWizard]

Google [bot] said:

Change all the tap washers.

+ 1 nice and easy job this....

[ferg]

I'd have a look at the pipework in the loft (cold feed to CWS tank) and see if it can be clipped better, or maybe consider an equilibrium ballvalve up there.

[Google [bot]]

GingerWizard said:

Google [bot] said:

Change all the tap washers.

+ 1 nice and easy job this....

I'm serious. I work in property management, I'm no plumber but in my experience faulty or perished washers are the issue 90-odd% of the time. And it's not a big job.