From bad to worse, more remodel woes

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kat-diy

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Ok, so we thought we were home free with the plumbing til we went to hook up the bath drain this am. This is what we found. This pipe at the end of the purple line is busted, with the treads busted off in the piece above it. The problem we face is the lack of room to spin and turn to get stuff off, so whats the easiet way to do this? Thanks for any help!!

drain.jpg
 

kat-diy

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ok update. Touched that pipe and it fell right off, leaving rusty threads stuck in both of the T pieces. Can't seem to bust that bottom tee off the lower pipe in addition to not being sure how to take care of the upper part.

drain1.jpg
 

Gary Swart

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Two large pipe wrenches should allow you the leverage to back the lower tee off enough to work on the broken pipe inside, and you can already get at the inside of the upper tee. You need to cut and pry the broken ends out of the tees. If you work carefully, you won't damage the tees' threads so much they won't seal with pipe dope. Now I have a question. What in the world is that bell shaped piece attached to the upper tee? Perhaps one of the pro plumber can ID it, but it's sure a strange looking thing to me.
 

Cass

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You need to get in there with a sawsall and cut everything out that is galvanized leaving enough to attatch a banded coupling on to it and replace as much as you can with PVC. Go as far as you can go with the PVC.
 

Master Plumber Mark

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sharp steel cutting sawzall blade

Thats a fun one


and Cass is !00% right


it looks like you could cut that pipe off above the floor
behind inside the acess panel

cut out that nasty old tee too.....


get yourself some fernco fittings and just rebuild

the whole thing with pvc and a trap


be sure to wear a hat cause you are gonna get

some FUNK spattering all over the place when you

cut out that Drum Trap


Also take out that GLASS panel or it will be covered in FUNK

lay some shets up there or yo u will probably

be spending more time cleaning up the mess

than the whole plumbing job took....
 
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kat-diy

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Thanks guys, just got back from HD with what we hope will fix this up. The threads inside those T's are completely shot, and we cant get the T busted off so we got a compression fitting for the bottom pipe, bought all new pvc tees and stuff and a new trap. Fortunately the pipe up through the floor is still behind an open wall so we are going to cut that and tap into that above the floor. I'm probably not explaining it right but it all makes sense when I see the pieces together.

Gary, That strange thing, are you talking about the trap?

Mark, thanks for the tip about the glass (actually plastic I think) and the gunk. Would not have thought of that and woulda had gunk everywhere! Fortunately its the basement and the floor is cement!

Will come back later to let you know if we succeeded or if we need more help. You guys are the best. I just might get to take a bath in my new tub tomorrow after all! (carefully of course, cuz we sure arent going to have time to get the tile on!)
 

Gary Swart

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Apparently that "thing" is a drum trap. It is my understanding they are no longer used. On rethinking the problem, I'm inclined to agree with Cass and Mark. Cut the mess out, replace with PCV and use a P trap instead of that drum "thingy".
 

Mikey

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You've probably discovered this already, but you can disassemble some of the ceiling gridwork without too much trouble and give yourself some working room.
 

kat-diy

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Ohh, a P trap woulda been a good idea! We thought we had to have the drum trap, so we bought a new one. It's almost put back together already. :)

We ended up tying into the vent pipe that you can see in my thread from the other day when we were trying to center the valve body. Thought we'd escaped that pipe but as it turns out we had to replace it anyway. If we'd known we would have gone ahead and made the adjustments to the valve. Oh well, at least we discovered this before the walls went up!
 

Gary Swart

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I did a quick Google search on drum traps and while it seems there still are some limited uses for them, but the recommendations are to change to a P trap. They generally are considered a nightmare because they become almost impossible to open and clean. You can not run a snake through them. They should never be used for a tub/shower.
 

kat-diy

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Well that really sucks cuz we're finished and we used the drum trap. Don't understand why it would be hard to clean, it just unscrews at the bottom. Can't imagine them being illegal if they sell them at HD. Can understand the snake problem but if you just open it and clean it that should work? Oh well, we certainly arent going to change it today!!

Here's the final results.

drainafter.jpg
 

Plumber1

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drum

If you had put a p-trap on that bath tub, you would have been able to clean that drain without taking that drum trap apart.

pvc isn't expensive. Before you close that area up, I sure would just put a p-trap in there.
 

kat-diy

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I'm confused...... you dont really have to take it apart, you just unscrew the bottom and clean it out. I'm not arguing your point because I do understand what you are saying, but I dont see it as such a big deal to clean.

My husband says he thinks this will actually be easier and more effective. I cant say one way or another, but if he's happy with it I'm probably not going to twist his arm to take it out unless there is something non functional about it.
 

Plumber1

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drum

OK, this is the way that I look at it. suppose the drain stops working and you need to clean the drain. Go ahead and unscrew that plug on the trap. You'll probably get a lot of dirty water and you will try to catch it with a pail.

With proper equipment I would just clean it from the overflow side of the tub's waste and overflow. Probably no more that 10 min. and no mess.
 

Gary Swart

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Well, you came to this board and asked for help. True, the trap advice came unsolicitated, but you might want to consider that the folks who give advice on the board are anywhere for fairly accomplished DIYer to expert professional plumbers. Not one of us has give a good word for the drum trap. Why you thought you had to have one, I don't know, but there are plenty of reasons why you should change it to a P trap before you close the work up. You might check with the plumbers in your area and ask if they would recommend a drum trap.
 

Bob NH

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What is amazing to me is that between 1:03 and 7:25 (my computer time on the posts) you got all that stuff together in what looks to me like the cleanest and neatest old plumbing area that I can imagine.
 

Cass

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Well the drum trap appears upside down and the T with the C/O on it should be a Y and st.45 with a C/O. The right trap should be used. The coupling that connects the gav. to plastic may work but it is not a banded coupling like it should be. The banded couplings hold the pipe riged, that coupling will not. You also should have cut out as much of the galv. pipe as possible, there still seems to be quite a bit left but then again I can't tell how far the pipe continues.
Other than that it is a clean neat job.
 

kat-diy

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Well, you came to this board and asked for help. True, the trap advice came unsolicitated, but you might want to consider that the folks who give advice on the board are anywhere for fairly accomplished DIYer to expert professional plumbers. Not one of us has give a good word for the drum trap.

I absolutely agree with you. I was not trying to be argumentitive and I know you guys are right. But my point was, the drum trap was already installed before anyone said anything about it being illegal or not used anymore. So at that point I was simply mentioning what I thought (as a novice) were its good points. Please don't think we dont appreciate all of the advice we have been given. But its put together now and while we will surely change all this in the future, it probably wont be today or tomorrow. Thats all I was really saying.

We thought we needed a drum trap because there was one there already. My husband likes it so he was happy to put in another. We were told (not by anyone here) that we needed a compression fitting there, not a banded coupling, so that's why we did that fitting. We were in a huge time crunch here and were half way finished with this before we really had any responses here or had a chance to read. We didnt have the luxury of waiting to do this today or next weekend. So yes, we jumped the gun on the advice here.

So at least now when we have the time we know the proper way to do it and we appreciate that everyone took the time to help us.
 

kat-diy

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Cass, shouldn't the plug on the trap be at the bottom? Are you saying it should be on the top? Yeah, can see what you mean about the Y, we just duplicated what was already there. As far as where we cut the galvanized pipe, it goes about 8 more inches to the left and we cut it there because there was some grooves from a pipe wrench further down the pipe that we thought might interfere with the fitting. The compression fitting seems pretty rigid to us, other than that is there any problems with this compression fitting?
 
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