Friday, February 16, 2018

Glamorous Life

Sure, level a urinal before hanging the drywall. Why not?

What can I say? I'm a plumber who studies toilets and urinals. It's not glamorous and doesn't make for great essays. I'm interested in this trade work because it's relevant to my future plans to build my own estate. Let me say that plumbers are dealing with many different details at once and I would recommend a long discussion about strategy with illustrated maps before starting. Water supply pressure/volume is important so don't go off and buy some fancy urinal that requires 1'' supply line when your house has 1/2'' supply line. The volume will be off and the flush-o-meter will struggle. Speaking of flush-o-meters, they need to match the pipe size of the spud on your fixture. Oh, yes. If the spud is 3/4'' such as on this top spud urinal, then go ahead and plan for a 3/4'' flush-o-meter. And that means, yes, the supply pex should be 3/4'' to supply the right volume. Or you can plumb the wall with 1/2'' pex, such as Oggy has done in the photo, and then realize the spud and sweat fitting are 3/4'' and then reduce the connections from 3/4'' to 1/2'', thus reducing the volume of the water and basically defeat decades of engineering by urinal manufacturing companies with your ignorance. Sure, they make $4 adapters to reduce a fitting to the size you have plumbed into the wall but I repeat that the volume of the water is extremely important and your 1/2'' pex will not magically carry the volume required to run a 1+1/4'' high volume toilet simply because you bought a $4 1/2'' ---> 1+1/4'' adapter or rigged up some ridiculous combination of adapters. No. There will be lots of goodies left over after each flush.

I told you this was not glamorous. It's not like there is one type of urinal and one type of flush-o-meter for sale in the world. There are hundreds of models of flush-o-meters. And there are hundreds of urinals. It's like randomly buying a nut and a bolt and hoping they fit one another. They likely will not fit, but you can pat yourself on the back that at least you bought a nut and a bolt that will fit another bolt and another nut. 

Flush-o-meters have all kinds of spud connection sizes and urinals have top spuds and rear spuds of all different sizes and there are jet wash urinals and washout urinals and low flow urinals and there are different combinations of spud sizes and sensor urinals and there are tankless toilets and back spud toilets where the plumbing is all in the wall and the size of the spud of the toilet determines the size of the flush-o-meter which determines the size of the pex or copper which determines the size of your water supply to the bathroom. 

That's the proper way to map this out, from the fixture itself back to the main water supply. If something doesn't add up then you have to go back to the fixture and start over, preferably before you bought anything. But if you start from the water supply and buy materials and work in the direction of the fixture then I think you will reach the fixture with 1/2'' pex and realize there is no such fixture that accepts 1/2'' pex unless it is a sink or a tanked toilet. But you already bought a 1'' spud tankless high volume toilet and a washout urinal with a 3/4'' spud. Ooops. Neither of those $400 fixtures will work. It goes on and on, hundreds of hours of Oggy trying to learn the plumbing trade by trial and error on a federal paycheck*. I guess someone has to milk that $200,000,000,000 budget for some gas money. 

They talked me into the 'wolverine' beard.

*Don't use anything I write as a guide to move forward with a plumbing project. I know only enough to get into trouble. The best generic advice I can give is to find someone to explain it and map it all out for you before buying anything. The variations and combinations for plumbing are seriously infinite.
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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.