16
May

Ventilation Intergration Complication Alteration

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DANGER OF THE WEEK AWARD

Bad Bathroom Fitter

When asked to plumb in a new tub, shower, basin and toilet we always expect to find something that doesn’t match between the old appliances and the new. Pipe work sometimes needs shifting left or right and waste pipes usually require some modifications to make them fit the new location of the tub and basin drains. In this house there were a few more surprises than expected and the problems started appearing as soon as floor boards were lifted.

When the basin was removed it was clear that the waste pipe ran uphill so it was constantly full of standing water. The ceiling under the basin had signs of leakage too as the standing water was dripping from the elbow under the floor. We decided to re-run the waste pipe via a different route so drained the standing water and went outside to remove the old pipe work. When up on the ladder and close enough to see behind the vent we could see that is was half covered over with the old standby; duct tape! There were no screws holding the cover to the wall so we cut the silicone caulking and as we peeled the vent aside the lack of quality workmanship became apparent.

I’m only guessing mind you but it looks like the bloke that installed the old basin didn’t want to go to the trouble of coring out a new hole through the brickwork so he removed the vent, shoved the waste pipe, used sand and cement to close in the hole, taped over half the air vent (I’m not sure why he went to that trouble?) and then glued and caulked the cover back to the side of the house.  The flexible extractor hose was only held in by friction as can be seen in the pictures above. The fan would have pushed all of the moisture from the kitchen into the air space between the inner and outer courses of brick. That is of course if the extractor worked!

The owner mentioned that the extractor stopped working when water from the basin leaked into the motor at some point after it was installed. We have now re-routed the pipe work through a nice neat hole and replaced all of the outside waste pipes as the outside joints also leaked and will shortly be installing the correct vent as well as making repairs to the extractor fan.

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2 Responses to “Ventilation Intergration Complication Alteration”


admin 1/August/2009

Just a quick update on this poor workmanship. We went to repair this issue yesterday but had to postpone. As reported last week the builder had cut a hole in the outside wall for the extractor but not extended the hole to the inside wall. We were wrong. Unfortunately however we weren’t that wrong. The builder had actual cut a hole on the inside of the building but it happened to be about four inches below the outside hole so we couldn’t see the hole until we removed the inside cupboard which was blocking the extractor pipe. His solution was to ignore the fact that the holes didn’t line up and leave the extracted kitchen air to be expelled into the buildings air space between the inside and outside wall.

We will be repairing that next week when the rain stops long enough to replace a few bricks on the outside wall at which time we will core a new hole low enough to line up with the one that has already been cut inside.