Workarounds

Sometimes you may think that IT is the only business where workarounds are used. Today i was reminded that other businesses do the same and some even make products out of it:

• I found out after over 10 years of owning my house (The house is much older, and the issue seems to be there right from the construction of the heating system) that one radiators in my house had swapped input (“Vorlauf”) and output (“Rücklauf”) pipes.
• A radiator with the swapped input and output has several problems, because the heating flow passes the valve in the wrong direction. They aren’t designed for this direction
• This problem is so common that there is a commonly known workaround for this, because most of the time you can’t simply swap both pipes without opening the walls and thus creating a large mess.
• You can buy piping components that can swap the water flow, if both pipes are closely together
• There are even valves, that can be used in the “wrong” direction, if there is no way to swap the water flows. Of course, the radiator gets warm at the bottom first.
• All vendors seem to sell those components. Naturally those valves and water blocks seem to be more expensive than normal components. Perhaps because they are not that common.
• The nice thing: Those valves are colloquially called botcher valves (don’t know if they are called this way in English, it’s the more or less direct translation of “Pfuscherventil”)

So next time you apply a workaround in your system … they are everywhere …