This week in plumbing

Sneak peak here; I'll post about finishing the plumbing rough-in on my build blog later.

Got the drain lines installed. crawling around under the house in 100 degree temps isn't fun. But I'm ready to dig a trench and put a sewer line to the street 250' away...Not going to do that until I get the vent system finished - I have to leave the 5' trench open for inspection.

So I started working on the vent part of the system. This is the part that stops the drains from sucking the water out of the p-traps, which would allow sewer gas into your home and make your house smell bad. The vents take the smells to the roof of the house. Every fixture gets a p-trap, and every p-trap gets a vent. The p-trap "traps" the gas by maintaining a small reservoir of water in the trap that blocks gasses from coming in through the pipes. Theoretically, you could just run the vent for each fixture directly to the roof, but that is inefficient, impractical, illogical, and ugly. So you end up connecting all of the vents together on your way to the roof and ideally exit the roof with just one or maybe two vents. In my design, the master bathroom vent loops around in the walls to a vertical pipe in the laundry room, and the washer loops around and meets up with the same pipe. This pipe then goes up to the second floor and meets up with the main vent (called a vent stack or a soil stack) - a 3" PVC pipe. This PVC pipe also has a connection from the kitchen and the main and future second floor bathrooms.

It's going faster than I anticipated - money is the factor slowing things down.