My townhouse has a shaft about 3' square from the basement ceiling to the attic "floor". IIRC part of it is filled with a laundry chute. I can't remember what else.
What is this shaft called? Do all recent houses of specific configurations in the USA have them?
How long have houses had these things? Our houses from the 30's and from the 50's didn't have one, but the 50's house had only a crawlspace, no basement.
I've always heard trade refer to them as a "f****ng utility chase"
No
Residential pyramids built a quarter bazillion years ago have them.
Could be a utility chase. Sounds like it would be good to have if there was a fire in the basement. It would be able to get flames to the attic faster to engulf the entire building. Not sure it would meet code today.
My < 1990 > home had one from the second story bathroom closet floor < with a hinged "door" covering the hole >
- down to the basement ceiling beside the laundry room. We did not find it useful in any way so we had it floored-over when the bathroom flooring was re-done ; and closed off when the basement was re-done. As someone else said - it's a one-way convenience - so not much benefit. John T.
I haven't seen anything like it here in NJ, can't imagine why you want a big shaft like that. I've said that it would be a good idea with new construction to run an empty conduit or two like that, for possible future wire pulls, but they don't even do that.
Definitely would NOT meet today's fire code - at least not without 2 hour fire rated walls and automatic fire doors -- - - - - -
That was most likely meant as a laundry chute. We had one in a cookie cutter tri-level where the bath was over the laundry room.
It had a door in the wall of the bath. Could be a fire code issue but then so was the stairway ;-)
We had one that was clearly a laundry chute. It also had a doorbell buzzer attached, purpose unknown. Send down the next load? Look out below? I dunno.
Or, just possibly it could be dumbwaiter, if the house was nice enough to have had servants.
I lived in a college dorm in the 70s that had a laundry chute, and worked in one ten years later that had a garbage chute.
New construction, big houses around here, with bedrooms upstairs, some are putting the laundry machines on the second floor. Not sure that's a good idea, for obvious reasons...
My childhood home had a laundry chute from the kitchen to the basement. Basement was accessed from the outside. We used the chute.
Dumb waiter was common in higher end older homes - and there was one in the farmhouse where my mother grew up, as well asin my other grandparents'house in town. Great for getting produce from the kitchen to the cellar and back,
I had forgotten that there was a plywood floor at the same height as the
2nd floor floor. So it would not function as a chimney.When I wanted to run wires from the basement to the attic, I had to lie on my belly in the attic, add a 1 foot extension to my 6 foot flexible drill bit and with my arm stretched as far down as it would go, try to drill a hole in the plywood. The flexible nature of the bit made this hard, took maybe a half hour. (I had no non-flex bit that long.) Then I had to come up with some way to pull the wires through the 3/4" hole. I forget how got the first string through, but after that, I could pull it back and forth to drag everything else.
I made a mistake in not leaving a "runner" there when I was done. Because they invented new wires, like maybe satellite feed. Not that I actually would have run more wires but I still should have made it easy for myself when it would have taken no effort to do that.
A 3/4" hole isn't enough to encourage or spread fire is it?
My girlfriend at the time who had a much bigger, fancier house than I did, custom-built, had a bedroom closet right over the laundry room. And she wanted a chute like mine. Just putting a hole in the floor didnt' seem like a good idea, but I thought about making a 20" high box with one of those spring-loaded laundry chute doors. I suppose you can tighten the spring to mount it horizontally. Better yet, mount the door in the side, then the top can be a seat or a shelf.
Fortunately for me, we broke up before I started to do this. She really wasn't worth the effort.
Hmmm. I used to live in Brooklyn in what had been a luxury building when it opened in 1930. Ten-foot ceiligns, hardwood floors everywhere, parquet floor in the dining room, french doors to the dining room and living room, from the hall, cedar closet in the hall, 2 BR plus maid's room, with 2.75 baths**. and a dumbwaiter in every apartment.
There was a doorbell so that the concierge in the basement could ring when he was sending up a package, and a button so that the tenant could ring him when sending something down. (Not trash. There was a trash chute in a small closet in the outer hall for all 5 aparments on the floor.)
They were gone by the time I got there, but it used to have a doorman, switchboard operator (who accepted the mail. No mailboxes), elevator operator (not sure if there were a separate operator for the rear building that had only 3 apartments per floor, one a studio), and a concierge in the basement. I think the elevator operator delivered the mail when no one needed him to run the elevator (which was automatic by the tiem I got there in 1973.
We still had some of either the original tenants, or at least they moved in when the building was fancy, and now they were old ladies, in their
80's. They had not paid a security deposit because with people like that, you didn't need security. Three of them gave me old things when they finally moved out, one of them was an end-table radio, case designed by Norman Bel Geddes** (which must be good because they put it on a sticker). It had broken in 1950 and not been played since then, but it worked for me the first time I turned it on around 1980, and gave v. good sound through its 10 or 12-inch speaker. However it never worked again. I still have it, but I was better at fixing tvs than radios. All its tubes are good. ****father of Barbara Bel Geddes. Do any of you remember her?
A better solution would have been to shove a piece of EMT (conduit) between floors with covered metal boxes at both ends. That is code compliant. Draft stopping is just that, you are stopping the flow of the products of combustion between floors (Hot gasses and smoke). They really want penetrations sealed. A fire would quickly make that 3/4" hole much bigger. Smoke is unburned fuel.
At both ends? There's no way I could have done that while lying on my belly 8 foot above the plywood. IN fact even skipping the boxes, there's no way I could have shoved the conduit through the hole, unless the hole was so big it slid right through, and then there would be air around the outside.
Okay. I'll try harder not to have a fire.
I think maybe she got to reading your usenet posts .. :-) John T.
Last house I wired we did just that. One difference though, it was put in during construction, not an after fit.
By code it should have DuctSeal (DUM-DUM) around the wire
Made in 1930
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