subject: Handling Your Own Shower Drain Installation Project [print this page] Upgrading a toilet is among the more popular do-it-yourself projects. Handling the plumbing for draining your shower can be extremely simple unless you go mad.
Whether or not you are a tub or shower person, the general public look for shower only options when purchasing a home. This easy fact means many house owners spend a weekend upgrading or installing showers in their toilets. Luckily for you, it's a reasonably straightforward process.
A collector or pan refers back to the horizontal surface located at the base of the shower. The collector often is composed of a non-slip surface barely banked towards the center or wherever the drain is found. Mixed with 3 to 4 inch walls round the side, the point of your shower drainage plumbing is to get the water to flow to and down the drain.
You can physically build a collector for your new shower, but you actually need to consider it. Do you want to get into the complications of getting the sloping correct, not to mention ensuring every facet of it is water-proof? And I mean each aspect! It is far easier to simply get a pre-cast collector online or at your local Lowes, Home Depot or ironmongers. Building one might seem like a clever idea, but you'll potentially feel differently after a few hours.
Irrespective of how you go about getting a pan, you need to make serious efforts to use one which has the drain located in the same spot as the first pan. Moving the drain pipes could be a task, especially if the builder made use of a unique framing structure. If you're keen to move the drain, you're going to cut back the pipe or lengthen it, that may mean ripping up big bits of the floor. Put an alternate way, you're going to be having a look at a multiple weekend project.
Presuming we've got our drain lined up, the particular hook up is reasonably easy. The drainage pipe should be facing vertical up to the collector. It'll regularly seem like a "U", meaning it acts as a cleanout to keep unpleasant smells from coming back up from the drain. To attach the drain, you're going to make a water tight connection between a drain cap on the pinnacle of the pan and the drainage pipe. Systems alter, but you are generally about to do this by putting a coupling piece on top of the drainage pipe. This is then covered with gaskets and literally screwed into the drain cap. The drain cap should act as a locknut, to wit, it screws at once onto the coupling.
The difficult part of this process is getting your drain cap to fit into a watertight position in the pan. This is realized by backing off the drain cap once you are certain everything fits together. At this point, you put plumbers putty round the bottom of the cap and then screw it back on. The putty should form a tight seal between the cap and the shower pan, which keeps water from trickling under it and into the framing under the shower.
Obviously, bathroom showers come in a wide variety of styles these days. If you purchase a collector, they almost always come with plumbing instructions or the store can note anything unusual you should know. It sounds complex, but is typically pretty straight forward. Have fun!
