Awake

It’s 4am and I woke up about an hour ago thinking about our plumbing “situation”. Last week I started thinking about replacing our plumbing stack (which is cast iron, btw.) with an all new one. The reason for this full replacement is to make it easier to add a fitting for the new toilet on the 1st floor, and to correct a pretty poor job of tapping in the second floor toilet.

Yesterday I had the realization that we’re also going to have a troublesome time with our kitchen drain. The current drain is under-sized (1 1/2”), where code is specifiying 2”. The current drain for the kitchen leads to the basement laundry room and is also taking drain water from the washer and utility sink. It leads underground where I suspect my basement bath also drains into the same small-diameter pipe.

Now envision the fact that this 1 1/2” pipe isn’t propery vented.

Bottom Line: I woke up this morning because I’m anxious about this problem. I don’t exactly want to exacerbate this problem by adding another device (the boiler), AND, I want to be confident that our kitchen is well drained and vented. Oy.

I think I have a plan however. It needs some further contemplation - and I’m about to draw it out in Visio. But I think it will work, and perhaps we’ll get started today by replacing the stack… I wonder what Trissa will think when she wakes up!