Remodeling Basement Bathrooms

By The Home Renovator

As this article explains, one of the biggest challenges in remodeling a basement is installing basement bathrooms due to the gravity needs of most sanitary fixtures ...

One of the biggest challenges in remodeling a basement is installing basement bathrooms due to the gravity needs of most sanitary fixtures. During home construction, sanitary sewer lines are placed sloping from the fixture to the lines leading outside the home and then continue to slope towards a municipal sanitary sewer system or to a septic system, depending on your location.

In some cases, the basement may already be fitted with water line drains to the sanitary sewer and the worst case scenario in installing basement bathrooms may be to install a larger drain pipe to handle the additional load. In many cases the lines can be tied into existing lines. If there is no sanitary sewer tie in installed in the basement, one will have to be added to the existing system to make room for the extra discharge from a sink and a commode. This will require specific size drain pipes, as directed by the local building codes.

Once the bathroom has been properly drained, vent pipes will also be required and although they usually vent to the ceiling, some codes allow a vent originating lower than a previous installed pipe can be attached. However, there are locations in which adding basement bathrooms will require the addition of separate vent for the new bathroom. The vent would have to go all the way up through the roof and match the requirements for its height above the roof line.

Lower Bathrooms Challenge Drainage System

In cases where the basement bathroom’s floor is going to be on a higher elevation than the drainage system, a different approach will be needed to move the bathroom discharge to the sanitary sewer system or the septic system. Most often used is a flush system that utilizes vacuum to move the water upwards into an existing system. Regardless of how much pressure is behind a commode when it is flushed, there has to be a mean to move it in to the sewer system, or the building code will never approve the installation.

Rare cases will require digging up the floor as well as the yard to install the necessary plumbing for basement bathrooms. Essentially, the construction would be starting from scratch in insuring the drain runs consistently downhill from the commode to the sewer line, and even then there is no guarantee it would flow downwards enough to allow proper flow. In extremely rare cases, the homeowner may have to give up on having basement bathrooms or be prepared to perform a lot of site excavation to install one.

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