Soil pipe routing

[Nutkey]

I want to add a new toilet on the ground floor. The obvious way to do this is to run the soil pipe with sufficient fall (> 1 in 40) to an external wall, drill through the external wall, and then drop down to a suitable level to run everything underground to the inspection chamber.

Is that normally how it's done? Seems damn ugly to have a fat bit of pipe poking out of the wall near ground level The only alternative I can think of is to drill through the footings below ground level, and break out some of the blocks in the beam and block floor - neater but a lot more work, and might not be sufficient clearance between beams to be able to work effectively and do a proper job...

Constraints - the pipe has to go through the front wall as the side wall is the boundary with the neighbour's garden. The floor is a "concrete beam suspended floor system" which I presume means beam and block. The footings seems to be 1200mm of bricks below ground level supported by 300mm x 1000mm concrete, so there is plenty of space to drill below ground level.

[Tim Watts]

Nutkey wibbled on Monday 12 July 2010 21:49

It's a very common method, yes.

Would have thought it's going to be damn difficult to manoeveur a 110mm bend section through a (say) 5" hole in the floor *or* foundation wall, let alone plug the pipes in and ensure it's well enough supported so it can't blow apart (probably not if the 2 adjacent pipes are cemented in to wall/floor close by, but I'm guessing what your installation might look like).

I took a 110mm rest bend under the foundations here to act a permanent dry guide for the mains water incomer, but I managed that entirely from the outside as the floor slab was only 4" farmers concrete onto earth and the foundations were about a foot deep (I went clean under the concrete strip - yes I did pack the hole bloody solid with lots of concrete afterwards!).

A bit of black 110m outside curving down into the ground won't look too bad IMO, especially if the job is 100 times easier. After all, many people have huge amounts of 4" pipe on their house for fully external drain stacks.

Build something over it like a large plant pot pedestal or something if it annoys you :)

[Tim Watts]

Tim Watts wibbled on Monday 12 July 2010 22:57

And, it's an excellent place for a rodding cap (won't add much to the bulk).

[cynic]

Cue the Saniflo article!