More Plumbing Excitement

The photo below is taken in the bathroom area upstairs. Here you can see the vent line that comes up from the kitchen sink (below... on the main floor), the bathroom sink drain, and the vent that goes up through the roof.

The orange test caps are installed just so as to cap off the drain system until the plumbing inspection is done. They seal the system so that I can fill it up with compressed air and check for leaks. Once the inspection is done, I'll take the caps off and finish up.

Once the plumbing inspection is done, I'll put in a piece of pipe to connect the drain system with the vent through the roof (the blue lines). I left this section of pipe out for now... so that I could put the test cap here... inside the house. If I would have put this section of pipe in now, the test cap would've had to go up on the roof. I honestly don't know if the plumbing inspector will be okay with this idea, but I sure hope so. I don't want to have to get back up on the roof just to put on and then take off a test cap.

(Click on the photo to enlarge it.)

Main Bathroom Drain Installation

I've started to install the drain system for the main bathroom. It's much easier to run the drain pipes parallel to the floor joists (i.e. in-between the joists), than to run them perpendicular to the joists (i.e. through the joists), but unfortunately I found it was unavoidable to have some of the pipes run perpendicular to the joists.

To install the drain lines I had to cut out some 4.5" holes in the floor joists. Although it seems that cutting such a large hole in the joist would weaken it, the engineering specifications for the joists do allow for holes of this size to be cut out.

Also, in an earlier post I mentioned that I was reinforcing the joists with plywood on one side so as to stiffen up the floor. Where I've had to cut holes in the joists for the drain lines, I'm installing the reinforcing plywood on both sides.

Ideally, the plywood reinforcement should be applied before I run the pipe through the joists... and for the most part I've done that. There are a couple of instances where I couldn't, so I'll have to cut some slots out of the plywood and fit it around the pipe afterwards.

Once I had the holes cut out, I started threading the pipe through in sections approx 12" long. The sections are joined together with ABS cement and a coupling fitting.



The odd shaped fitting on the right-hand side of the photo below is where the plumbing vent line will attach to the drain line.




A coupling fitting on the end.



That's a cleanout fitting on the right... to allow for access to the pipe in the unlikely event (I hope) that the drain gets really plugged.

Building Drain

The building drain is the lowest point of a home's plumbing system. It's where all of the other drains (sinks, showers, toilets, etc.) meet up. I've installed a back-water valve (aka back-flow preventer valve) in the building drain at the point just before the drain exits the basement underneath the footings.

If for some reason the septic tank ever gets full, the back-water valve will prevent any nasty stuff from coming back up the building drain and into the house.

When I pour the basement slab, the back-water valve will be left accessible for maintenance.

Rough Plumbing Work

I'm spending a bit of time on the Drain/Waste/Vent system again. I have to run some of the vent pipes up the exterior walls, so I have to cut some wide slots in the styrofoam.

There are hot-knife tools that are made specifically for cutting styrofoam, and I've also heard of people using electric chainsaws to cut away the foam. I don't really have that much to cut, so I can't really justify buying either a hot-knife or an electric chainsaw.

I've improvised by using my reciprocating saw with a very short blade. I make a couple of passes down each side of the slot, and then I use the claw end of hammer to hack out the foam. It does make a bit of a mess (that's where the hot-knife is better), but it works just fine.

For the tight spots where I have to take the foam out behind a floor joist... I just put a 12" blade in the reciprocating saw and make the cuts at a really shallow angle up behind the joist. Then I just poke away at the foam with a long screwdriver until it all comes out.

Plumbing Vent Details

This plumbing vent stack is made from 2" ABS pipe that protrudes up through the roof. A plastic and rubber flashing goes over top the vent pipe. The rubber top on the flashing is supposed to be self-sealing around the pipe, but because of the steep angle of the roof, the rubber didn't fit tightly around the vent pipe. I put some silicone around the joint, then put a second rubber flashing over the vent... similar to the storm collar that goes around the chimney.



The vent flashing is also just like the chimney flashing in that the shingles sit on top of the flashing on the upside of the slope, and the flashing sits on top of the shingles on the downside of the slope.



On underside of the roof, the pipe is secured to the roof framing with pipe strapping. The bottom end of the vent stack will eventually connect to the rest of the DWV (drain/waste/vent) system.