Imperfect pitch: 62 year old steam pipes

NCPR’s studios are located in an early-50s hospital building.  If you live in an old house you know that unexplainable structural phenomena happen pretty regularly.  Turns out it’s not much different here.  And while the Canton-Potsdam Hospital staff keeps the place running smoothly, the case of the mysterious banging steam pipe had us all kind of stumped.

Since I started working at NCPR in 1998 my production studio, where we can have as many as 16 microphones working at any given time, was always a nice quiet room all year ’round.  Then suddenly two years ago, winter brought some pretty noticeable pipe banging.

I grew up in an old house and I knew the sound right away.  It wasn’t too loud and didn’t happen all the time, so I worked around it.  Then last winter it was much worse.  Imagine someone hitting a pipe with a metal hammer just a few feet away from you every couple of minutes.  On the colder days when the boiler was running on high, that was the sound.  It was so bad that I had to shut down the studio for five months. We had to forego many recording sessions worth thousands of dollars in rental income.

Oh yeah, did I mention that there’s no steam heat in or near my studio?

All the while Radio Bob and several folks from the hospital tried to figure out the problem.  The heating plans were nowhere to be found at Saint Lawrence University (the building owner) or CPH (the building manager), so Radio Bob decided to do some detective work.  After lots of phone calls, emails and legal delays, we had the plans in-hand from the original architectural firm.

When 62-year-old plans start as large blueprints, get converted to microfilm, and get converted again to PDF files, a LOT of clarity is lost.  Matching those blurry plans with the pipe grid in the boiler room, which looks a lot like an upside down box of spaghetti, would be tricky.  But Radio Bob is a bit of a pro at squeezing success out of chaos and was able to figure out that the violating pipe was in the studio floor and wasn’t even part of the heating system.  A long time ago it was used to feed steam to sterilization tables.  A couple of years ago a valve that kept that old pipe steam-free started to fail.

So, just before Christmas our building manager, Kevin, was able to separate the pipe and cap it.  Fortunately there were a couple of cold nights on the way and he was going to run the furnace on high.  I ran a recording of the room for a few hours on a sub-zero night and heard…absolutely nothing.  Silence never sounded so good.

So now we can get back to partnering with local musicians no matter the season.  If you know anyone who might need some recording work done, please let them know that we’re happy to help.