Shallow shower drain.

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Hawaiian Gaijin

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Aloha from Hawaii.....

Thanks in advance....I think this forum is great!

I have pulled out an old cast iron bath tub and am planning to build a shower pan from scratch with an embedded liner.

The problem is that I am building on the existing concrete floor of an apartment condo. Floor is about 6 inches think and the P trap is below the floor up at the end close to where the tub drain was. I am unable to go to the apartment below and cut through their ceiling to build a new shower drain hole.

Hence....I need to build a tileable shower drain which will be on the concrete floor, and to make it as shallow as possible to reduce the height of the step up/down effect of entering/exiting the shower.

So far I have found a PVC shower drain with 90 degree elbow that comes up about 7 inches from the floor. With threshold, this will still be a big step down.

1) Is there any brand or product that exists for this problem?

2) I am assuming it is better to put my shower drain under the shower head instead of the middle of the 60 inch wide tub to reduce gunge build-up which may occur over time on the piping leading to the P-trap.

3) My P-Trap below is metal with a 1.5 inch opening. Also is it better to just remove this and replace it with new PVC or ABS?

Mahalo in advance,
Hawaiian Gaijin
 

Jadnashua

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Humm, this could be problematic. You might get an exemption, but a shower drain, in contrast to a tub drain, is supposed to be 2", not 1.5".

What you might want to look into is maybe using a trench drain (not sure that is the right name)...basically, instead of sloping the entire floor towards the middle, you slope it toward one end - the end where the existing drain is now. The floor would fall off to a trench the width of the shower. This technique is used in gang showers, like in a shower room at a school where it would be tough to put multiple individual drains.

Not sure of the details of how to do this, but worth looking into in your situation.

Where I live, the city codes do not allow anyone but a licensed plumber to do plumbing in a multi-family dwelling...you may want to check.
 

Geniescience

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what Jim said.

Make a gutter, a long drain channel, right on top of the existing drain hole. Inside the gutter are two slopes letting water slide to the drain wherever it is located inside that channel. Outside the gutter is a single flat plane sloped to that gutter. If you have a few inches' space on the other side of the gutter, use it to build a bench with. The gutter itself can be as shallow or deep as you want. Your drain can be any square or round drain made for floors, showers or rooves, or any roof-edge scupper drain.

Problem solved. No more concerns about "gunge" and "elbows" and "height of buildup" The floor is flat and low, and its slope is almost invisible because the floor is a single pane, a single plane, and not broken up into four planes slanted towards a hole in the middle. Very elegant. Charge more for the house when you sell it.

This works only when you custom build, which is what you are about to do.

This part I didn't get:
Hawaiian Gaijin said:
.... shower drain under the shower head instead of the middle of the 60 inch wide tub to reduce gunge build-up which may occur over time on the piping leading to the P-trap....
but it may not be relevant anymore.

David
 
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