LESLIE: Barry in Florida is dealing with a plumbing situation. Tell us what’s going on.
BARRY: Well, I replaced the sprayer in my kitchen sink. And I did – at the same time, I did a dishwasher and the dishwasher is working fine, no problem. And the sprayer, though, it’s been there 22 years. It just wasn’t spraying. I figured it was all clogged up so I replaced it and when I did, the new one – when I turn on the water – not the sprayer but the water – I get a bang-bang-bang like air in the pipes. But it’s been doing that for about a month now, waking everybody in the house up.
So, I thought maybe I’d call you guys and see if you could help me figure out – I’m a fairly handy – what do I need to do? Either replace the whole thing again – and I replaced it with a brand new one I bought at the hardware store.
LESLIE: Barry, when you said that the sound is waking everybody up, is it happening on its own or only when you’re using that sink?
BARRY: No, no. Only when you’re using the water. My wife told me that when I get up in the morning to make coffee, I wake her up by turning on the water. Only when you use the main water handle.
TOM: Now, does it happen when you turn the water on or when you turn it off?
BARRY: On. When you turn it on.
TOM: On?
BARRY: The whole time the water’s on it does that.
TOM: Hmm. That’s interesting.
BARRY: If I left it on for 20 minutes, it would do it constantly for 20 minutes. That’s why I don’t think it’s air.
TOM: And the whole time it’s on. Yeah, so, I think you’ve got a bad washer in there somewhere.
Now, if it happened when you were spraying and then you released it to turn the water off and you got banging then, that I would say is water hammer, because the water has a forward momentum in the pipes. And when you stop spraying the water, it keeps moving and bangs the pipes. That’s water hammer.
BARRY: Ah, yeah.
TOM: That has one solution. But if it’s happening just because you turn the sprayer on, then I think that the valve in the sprayer is bad and it’s probably vibrating somewhere in there. This happens sometimes with kitchen sinks. If you lift up the lever to turn the sink on, sometimes you get a kachunka-chunka-chunka-chunk kind of a sound.
BARRY: Yeah.
TOM: And that’s when you have a bad valve. And so I suspect that if you replaced just – you don’t have to replace the whole line but just the handle part of it. Try replacing that and see if it still does it. I think you’ve got a bad one there, buddy.
BARRY: You’re talking about the handle in the hand-held sprayer.
TOM: Correct. Yeah. And those are replaceable.
BARRY: OK. OK, sure, yeah. Absolutely. OK.
TOM: Alright, Barry. Give it a shot.
BARRY: Well, I’ll try that. I didn’t think – that’ll be an easy fix if that’s the fix.
TOM: And that’s what we hope for. Barry, thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
Thank you I had the same problem, but the hammering noise only happened when the sink faucet was being used, if you turned on the sprayer the hammering stopped. I changed the sprayer and the hammering disappeared.