Tip of The Week

March 31, 2007

This week’s tip comes from our “Picking up bad vibes” file.

Lots of our callers are looking for solutions to vibrating pipes or pipes that “creak and pop” as water, especially hot water, moves through them.

While creaking and popping are typically the result of the pipes expanding and contracting as they heat up and cool down, the vibrating can be the result of pipes that have come lose in the pipe clamps that fasten them to framing members (Studs, Floor Joists etc.) of the house.  Nice secure clamps will also reduce the amount of creaking and popping.

Fixing the clamps is easy when you have access in a crawl space or basement but when the pipes are in a finished wall the fix does not appear to be so easy. The truth is that the fix for these out of the way pipes is not really so bad.

Locate the vibrating or popping pipe in the wall cavity.  Purchase some Expanding Foam.  “Great Stuff”^TM is a brand of expanding foam.  (The type in the red can is the expanding type)  Bore a small hole in the wall that will allow you to place the tube from the spray can of expanding foam into the wall with a snug fit.  Shoot the expanding foam into the wall and let it set up.  Move on to the next pipe and repeat the process.

When the foam cures it will expand to fill the wall cavity and it will hold the pipe in place thus eliminating the vibrations.

One word of caution: expanding foam grows in size significantly.  If the wall cavity goes from floor to ceiling you will have no problems.  However if there is blocking or a fire stop in the wall do not overfill the cavity as the expanding foam can push the drywall away from the studs if it has nowhere to go.

Thanks for visiting Ask John and Dave.com and we’ll see you on the air,

John and Dave

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