Yahoo!

Every winter, as my boiler heating system is forced to gallop along, one particular zone develops a few air bubbles in the pipes.  Migrating around the loop of hydronic heating baseboards, these air bubbles sometimes produce noise ranging on a scale from mildly entertaining to frightening.

Not to long ago, my problematic zone took on more air and escalated in noise-making.  The zone began producing what sounded like an uneasy marriage between earth-moving machines working deep inside a gravel pit and a poltergeist mixing drinks with crushed ice in a metal cocktail shaker.

I have since bled sputtering and hissing bubbles of air from the offending heating zone.  We are once again at the occasionally entertaining level of sounds where the hydronic system randomly emits a little “ta-da” or releases something of a “yahoo” at the beginning of a heating cycle.

For now, we celebrate heating my house.

—Mitchell Hegman