A project with my dad
On Thursday I got a call from someone in Ballard with a slow draining shower. After I’d finished my jobs for the day, I went over to check it out. They had tried using one of those barbed pieces of plastic down the bottom of the tub but to no avail. The trick with tub/shower drains is to take the plate off the overflow (if you’re laying in your tub, this is the piece right in front of you, below the tub spout), and send your cable down this drain. Behind the scenes, these drains form a 90 degree angle and flow into a P trap below the tub. Well, the new ones do anyway.
Back in the day, they used a “drum trap”. This predecessor to the P trap is a cylinder that allows water into the bottom, fills the cylinder, and lets the water flow out a discharge pipe near the top. The function of P traps and drain traps are the same, they are a water block that prevents sewer gases from flowing into your living space. The old drum traps were cleverly designed to have a removable top that would sit flush (or rather - plumb) with the floor in your bathroom. This way, in the case of a clog or blockage, you could simply unscrew the top of the drum trap and have immediate access for servicing.
Back to Ballard. This house had a drum trap. Which, while easier in some ways to service, cannot be cabled through the overflow line. Your cable simply cannot find the discharge pipe and a plumber risks poking a hole in the side of an old drum trap. So I tried unscrewing the top of the drum trap and - as frequently happens with 85 year old plumbing - it broke. Luckily only the cap broke so there was no immediate harm done. The homeowners had another shower in the house so we scheduled for me to return Saturday morning for a proper fix.
My dad happened to be visiting this weekend so I pitched it to him as a fun way to spend some time together. He spent his first career as a journeyman carpenter so I think he genuinely enjoyed getting inside a ceiling - and also seeing what I do for work on the plumbing side.
It was a bit of a struggle to triangulate exactly where the drum trap was from the ceiling below the problem-tub. But once we found it, we cut the old drum trap out, keeping the drain waste and overflow assembly in tact. Using the old assembly, we built a new one out of ABS drain piping, attached a modern P trap, added a street 90, and a Fernco onto the old galvanized steel drain piping. Those two sentences took about 3 hours to complete but it was a great project and I was happy to spend some time working with my dad.