I've read Part H back and forth, and I'm still not sure.
I'm converting an old chapel. It's got combined foul & rainwater drainage. Pre-existing is a 1.1m deep manhole, 2m in front of the building, followed by a 5m run to connect to the public sewer
Also pre-existing is 4 pipes come into the manhole, 1 pipe each for rainwater from each side of the building (at half the depth of the manhole), and 2 pipes originally connected to ground floor toilets at or near the front of the building (1 is still connected to a toilet, one to a sink) right at the bottom of the manhole. All are working correctly.
The only soil vent pipe was a branch off one of rainwater pipes, unfortunately part of this pipe has collapsed.
Now, ideally, I'd like to route the soil stack internally up to these existing ground floor toilet connections.
My questions:
- For the upstairs bathroom, I'd need to have a horizontal soil branch pipe 4m long (well actually the prescribed 18mm/metre slope) from the loo, followed by 4m vertical drop, followed by a 1.5m horizontal section up to the existing point were the soil pipe goes underground. (no offsets necessary in horizontal pipework).
Is that layout likely to be acceptable to BC and likely to be trouble free?
- Waste water from the kitchen is a bit of a problem as the kitchen needs to be at the back of the building.
a) One solution is a 5.5m horizontal pipe run up to the same point the upstairs bathroom goes underground - that concerns me as a long horizontal kitchen sink sounds likely to clog.
b) Another solution is drop the upstairs bathroom soil stack closer to the kitchen, resulting in a short upstairs branch pipe, 4m vertical section, and a 5.5m horizontal section (of 100mm pipe) before it goes underground.
In this solution the kitchen would connect close to the bottom of the
4m section. I think the advantage would be the ground floor horizontal section would clear better because of upstairs loo flushing.The disadvantage would be if the stack blocked at this ground floor bend and backed up - it's close to the kitchen branch - yuck. There's a Part H rule about no connections within 750mm of a stack offset - I guess for exactly that reason. I can however just meet that rule with a raised area in the kitchen.
So - my question is - does solution 2a or 2b sound better?
- A simple one this time. It would be convenient to repair that open vent pipe to one of the rainwater branches - and for the internal stack just to have an air admittance valve within the bathroom (above spillover levels). I can't be sure if that complies with Part H - though I don't see why not - whadyathink?
- There will also be a ground floor toilet with a similar offset in the soil pipe, shorter though, so I don't see any problem there. However it's a 8m from the kitchen so I don't think it can be used to solve the problem in 2b. Any ideas here?
- HepVO - reading their docs seems to suggest use them and no AAV's necessary - correct?
I'm also thinking that a HepVO may better protect the kitchen against backups in pipework?