More Things That Go Bump In The Night

So you might be interested to hear whether or not replacing the fridge water dispenser valve fixed my water hammer issues. The answer is... it improved the situation. There's a few other potential noise sources though, so let's deal with them too.

We'll start where we left off, at the fridge. The one component that sits between the water inlet and the valve is this here water filter.

The original filter cap was damaged long before I inherited this fridge from the previous homeowners, so I 3d printed a replacement, mainly aiming to make it reasonably easy to twist the filter the required 1/4 turn to install or remove it. The broken parts of the original were, however, still with the unit when I moved in.

The original part has a pair of extra tabs on it that fit into the filter housing, and I was suspecting that these might help support the outer end of the filter to keep it from potentially rattling around inside the housing.

I had initially, a few years back, tried to repair it using super glue, but as we all know attempting to repair a plastic part like this with super glue usually just leaves you with glue residue stuck to one side of the now twice-broken joint.

So instead we'll try a more robust fix, starting by cleaning and roughing up the mating surfaces.

And instead of super glue, this time I'll be using epoxy putty. You might remember this as being the same material I used recently to fix the top of my industrial sewing machine table.

I kneaded up a wad of it, rolled it into a snake, and formed it around the circumference of the parts, squishing them together and making sure that some of the material got keyed into the slots on the white plastic bit.

While we wait for that to cure, let's have a look at cleaning up the plumbing spaghetti under my bathroom sink.

The black item here is the bypass valve for my hot water recirculation pump. It's intended to be screwed into the wall, but the positioning of the valves and drain here, combined with the annoying orientation of the connections, makes this a lot more inconvenient than it ought to be, thus why I had left it hanging loose all this time.

However, with a bit of rearranging I managed to find an orientation where I could actually screw it to the wall.

It's not perfect, but none of the lines are kinked so I'm calling it good enough.

Meanwhile the epoxy has cured, so let's take off my 3d printed handle and put the original part back in place.

And then we can put the filter back in the fridge.

Did this solve the water hammer noise completely? No, of course not, but at least it's a little more aesthetically pleasing.