What is water hammer waterhammer?
Danced all around it, but never hit the target. A water hammer is when the mass of moving water is stopped by the shutting off of an open valve too quickly, the weight and inertia of the water exceeds the tolerance levels of the pipe and the pipe explodes or bursts outwards from the pressure. For an example. If a fireman opens up a hydrant to put out a fire and 100 gallons are flowing out of the pipe at any given time, if the fireman closes the valve too quickly, the water pressure on the bottom of the hydrant can be as much as 5 thousand gallons in motion at 8.34 lbs per gallon. Thats over 40 thousand pounds of pressure on a single valve or section of the water pipe. Most are not made for this tolerance and I have seen up to 160 feet of pipe literally explode from the water hammer that was formed.
