This toilet flushes anywhere, even uphill
Macerating unit can be installed anywhere and is able to lift waste water 18 vertical feet
How do you install a bathroom where drain pipes don’t exist? It’s a challenge that’s stopped more than a few home renovation plans, but it doesn’t have to. And to understand the solution, you need to understand more about the problem.
All ordinary bathrooms must hook up to drains that flow by gravity. Trouble is, not all household locations that can accommodate a bathroom space-wise include the large-diameter, sloped drains required to make it happen. In fact, most areas do not. That’s because big drain pipes need to be worked into any structure at the earliest phases of construction, and it’s impossible to see all future needs at the blueprint stage.
If your basement floor sits at a lower level than the main drain leaving the building, for instance, regular toilets, sinks and showers won’t work. If the spare bedroom that’s never used anymore doesn’t have plumbing roughed into the floor, it would be massively trou- blesome to install the 3-inch or 4inch diameter drainpipe and vent required to convert it into a bathroom. If the attic you’re renovating doesn’t have pipes of any kind, you’re looking at a messy and expensive campaign to get big drains in place.
All this said, there is at least one option for making bathrooms happen without immediate access to conventional drainage systems.
Imagine a toilet that drains through nothing larger than a
3⁄4- inch pipe. Imagine if this toilet system could also pump the water it handles uphill. No need for big, sloped drains. This is what a company called Saniflo makes happen. They’ve been around for about 50 years and I’ve known them for the last 15.
Saniflo has a good reputation around the world, and a strong presence here in Canada (www. saniflo.ca, 1-800-363-5874). What I haven’t seen until recently is how their systems work on a mechanical level. How, exactly, do they make it possible to hook up a toilet to a pipe that’s less than 5 per cent of the cross-sectional area of a normal toilet drain pipe? What I found after pulling a unit apart is an interesting combination of simplicity and heavy-duty design. The main part of the system is something called a macerating unit. The particular model I worked with is called Sanibest, and it’s shaped like a toilet tank except that it’s made of white plastic and plugs into a wall outlet. A specially-designed, 6-litre porcelain toilet connects to the macerating unit, with additional ports for accepting 11⁄ 2- inch and 2-inch drain lines from a sink and shower. The heart of the macerating unit reminds me of a blender. You’ll find an oil-filled, motorized assembly that unbolts from inside the reservoir after opening it up. Flip the motor over and you see where the dirty work happens. A pair of heavy, angled blades rotate over the intake ports. As waste is drawn in, it’s sliced to smithereens, then pumped up and out.
Installing a bathroom without existing plumbing involves pipes that are small enough to mount externally on the inside face of walls. It’s still necessary to slope these pipes the proper amount (1/4 inch of drop for every 12 inches of horizontal run). The macerating unit also needs to be vented to allow air to enter the system to replace the volume of water pumped out. The model I looked at is strong enough to lift waste water 18 vertical feet, while also pushing it horizontally anywhere from 60 to 240 feet.
Building a bathroom without access to big, sloped drains requires more technically complicated hardware, and this does mean more things to break over the years. That said, today’s technology has advanced to the point where reliability isn’t much of an issue. All that really matters is the ideal location. Steve Maxwell, syndicated home improvement and woodworking columnist, has shared his DIY tips, how-to videos and product reviews since 1988. Visit him at www.stevemaxwell.ca, Facebook at Canada’s Handiest Man or @Maxwells_tips on Twitter.