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We keep having periodic humming in our pipes. STILL. We it in the pipes when we moved in, and the water company guy told us we needed to have the restrictor valve replaced. We did that, and it changed. And mostly went away. But for the last year, it's been happening with much more frequency.
I'd convinced myself that it was because we had a long horizontal pipe
run between the entrance to the house and where it starts feeding
fixtures in the house. So I put a U-bend in the pipe right in the
middle of that run:
Well, that didn't work. I dont' think it even modified it much. I'm gratified that I was able to splice a fairly major piece of pipe in the middle of a run in PVC, but it didn't achieve its purpose.
We discovered that the U-bend didn't fix it just as I was about to leave the house on a trip. One major difficulty with this series of problems is that the phenomenon is very difficult to reproduce reiliably. Even when it's doing it, sometimes it won't happen for days at a time, so it's very difficult to be able to go down there when it's happening.
When it did it again, I went downstairs, and
realized that the source of the vibration itself seems to be a point
just after the entrance to the house. If I held my hand firmly on
the elbow, it would stop all together. So as a stop-gap, I tied two
heavy objects to the pipe near that point to try to dampen the
vibrations:
I used the book-end and the camshaft because they were handy. The
book-end is upside-down because that way it doesn't slide off of the
cable tie.
I'm not sure when round 3 will be. If damping the vibrations by tying things to the pipe doesn't work, then we may need to call a plumber out again and try to find the problem for real.