Drain and vent rough-in
Once the house is framed, the rest of the drain system goes in — everything above the floor, up through the walls and out the roof.
Fall is the entire job
A drain is a pipe on a slope. Too flat and the water leaves the solids behind, which is a blockage three years out that looks like bad luck and is not. Too steep and the same thing happens for the opposite reason. Every horizontal run gets a level on it as it goes in — that is what is happening in the first photo.
What a vent is for, since nobody is ever told
Every trap in the house — under a sink, inside a toilet, in a shower pan — holds a little water, and that water is the only thing between the room and the sewer. Drain a tub with no vent and the rushing water pulls that seal straight out of the trap beside it. The vent lets air in behind the water so the seal stays put. A house that smells and nobody can find why is usually a venting problem.
How far a fixture can be from its vent
There is a published distance for every pipe size, and it is measured from the weir of the trap to the vent fitting, not to the nearest pipe going up. It is one of the rules most often got wrong, because it is easy to let another fixture discharge into that run first — at which point it is a wet vent, which is a different set of rules again.
Tested the same way the ground was
The above-slab system is capped and filled and held for the inspector the same as the underground was. Two inspections, two tests, and both of them before any of it is covered in sheetrock.
Questions we get asked
Why does my drain gurgle?
A gurgle is air being pulled through a trap because it cannot get in anywhere else. It usually means a vent is blocked, undersized, or was never run. It is worth looking at — the gurgle is the warning before the smell.Does every fixture need its own vent?
Every trap has to be vented, but not always by its own separate pipe to the roof. There are legitimate ways to vent several fixtures off one stack, and there are shortcuts that look like them and are not. Which one you are looking at is the difference.The rest of the job
Where we go
Parker, Wise and Tarrant County, out of the shop in Springtown. Springtown, Weatherford, Azle, Boyd, Decatur, Newark, Millsap, Fort Worth and the country in between.
Call 817-487-8866