Downstairs Venting

So. More plumbing. It's finally raining here, thank goodness, and what better way to spend a rainy weekend day than gluing pipes together?

Noel got us started by drilling a hole for the vent for the downstairs toilet. Code requires a vent within six feet of the drain's exit from the fixture, and that vent cannot run horizontally until it is at least six inches above the fixture's weir level (which is to say, the top of the water in the toilet).

This required some kind of funky manipulations in the basement, to get the pipe over to the wall (if we ran it straight up, it would come out in the middle of the little understair closet -- not desireable) and around a floor joist (the joist is pretty much right next to where the hole is in the floor there).

Noel made this little clamped thing to hold the pipe exactly vertical, so we could test-fit and measure accurately. It took a while to figure out how to best arrange things, but with the help of some 22-degree elbows, we managed to get the vent to go from the drain under the floor joist and up through the wall.

Noel stayed upstairs to cut pipe for me and hand me things, coming down a couple times to help me test fit and work on geometry issues. The hole from the relocated air return has come in very handy during this work. We're almost done with the work in the basement, and we are definitely done with the complicated part, but it would have been much harder to work effectively if we didn't have this large hole to pass tools and materials back and forth.

And this is our new vent. Well, the part under the floor.

Above the floor, assembly went much faster. We had to jog the vent out a little to get around the wide part of the toilet tank, but then it was up to the sloped ceiling, and under the stairs to the new flat ceiling.

When we got to the flat ceiling, Noel paused in the plumbing to install the couple of ceiling joists (the new ceiling is pretty small). We'll work the vent around those joists and over to the corner where we're running all the plumbing.

We're getting very close to having to buy the rest of our plumbing fixtures to be able to continue.

In the meantime, last weekend we fetched this hive from a friend of mine, as a replacement for the hives that died in the freeze AGAIN. Bees should not be unable to handle a freeze, so I was not keen on buying more bees from the same supplier. Instead I have this hive and I can do a split in a few weeks, since we're apparently having an early spring here. They were out and flying today in between showers, so they seem to have adapted to life a half mile from their old home.

posted by ayse on 02/09/14