fitting a shower tray directly above waste pipe

[kmillar]

A friend of mine wants to change his cloakroom toilet into a shower.

The existing toilet pan waste exits vertically downwards into the floor, in almost exactly the same place I'd be fitting the shower tray. Which is handy.

Once I remove the toilet and it's pipe work I am left with the mouth of the sewer at floor level - like a big round hole in the floor. It's an old ceramic waste. So if you can imagine it, I'm left with the mouth of a waste pipe pointing straight up, at floor level.

As it happens, it's almost exactly where then shower trap will exit - so my question is, whats the best way to interface the shower trap to the existing waste pipe?

[Tim S]

kmillar coughed up some electrons that declared:

You can get a soil pipe to converter - looks like a flat end plug with a single small socket in the top, offset from centre. Quite slim. unfortunately screwfix don't do one, so you may need to hunt around.

I can't remember if it was more of a plug (pushes into the pipe, which would be ideal for you) or a cap (soil pipe goes into it) which would require you to adapt it in, probably making it too proud of the floor.

Anyway, from the side it looks like this:

___| |_ | |

Cheers

Tim

[YAPH]

Fit an old-fashioned French squat WC tray? ;-)

BSF, problem if the new shower waste is too close to the soil pipe is that you can't fit any sort of trap with a side exit (because the exit needs to be underneath the trap, not to the side). I'd be thinking in terms of those traps where there's a dip tube that can be removed from the top of the trap (i.e. from the tray, when all installed) and the trap body is a sort of sump. The tube forms a trap when it's inserted but when removed you can clean the sump out. I'd be thinking of constructing a sump out of solvent-weld pipe and fittings of a bore intermediate between the soil pipe i/d and the dip tube o/d (e.g. 40, 50 or 67mm) that would seal to the base of the shower tray and to the soil pipe. Difficulty would be assembling and sealing it all, whilst laying the tray.

Possibly a constructed tray, a la wet room (or even a full wet room) might be easier to engineer.

[Tim S]

YAPH coughed up some electrons that declared:

What about building a standard tray up on a small containment box, to give extra height and clearance for pipes?

[kmillar]

Yes that's a possibility that had crossed my mind. I thought there would be a 'waste reducer' such as the poster above mentioned, but I can't find one anywhere.

It's looking like I'll use a low profile trap and some concoction to seal it's output to the soil pipe. Thanks everyone.

[robgraham]

You must take into account the ability to clear the trap - showers are notorious for blocking with hair IME.

Rob

[Slider]

My shower trap has a removable section (from the top) to catch hairs / bits-n-bobs

[Dave Starling]

How about if the OP uses one of those traps and then fit an elbow from the output straight down into the soil pipe hole. Or to be really cheap, lash up an 's' bend with 4 elbows! Have seen that done with a condensate outlet before.

Dave.