> Any drain attached to the sanitary sewer system has a trap. Your floor
> drain in your basement has a trap. Your sink has a trap. Your toilet IS a
> trap.
I would only note that this is true in areas with building codes. When
traveling in China with a friend who's in the plumbing-supply business,
he noted that such is not consistently the case there.
It's pretty typical for restaurants in China to have a lot of private
rooms. It's also typical for these to have their own smallish restroom.
And oftentimes it's typical for the toilets in these restrooms (often
of the "Napoleon's footprints" variety, not the sort of porcelain we're
used to here in the US) not to have traps. Which can create an
interesting mix of smells.
> The only thing that does not have a trap is the vent pipe or pipes (my
> house has two) which go out through your roof. These pipes vent gasses
> from the sewer system. These are useful to Animal Control when they are on
> rat-hole calls. They throw a smoke bomb down the rat hole and chase it
> with a leaf-blower. Smoke curls out of the vent on top of the house. Time
> to notify the owner that he has a break in his sewer service. Of course,
> if the owner has not been filling his floor drain, he gets a smoky
> basement.
I wish them luck with ours...during our remodel, we inadvertently ended
up with nine power skylights instead of the three we were supposed to get.
Now, per building code, vent stacks are required to be some significant
distance horizontally or vertically from any opening into the house - be
it skylight, roof vent, etc. What this meant was that I've basically
got a manifold in the attic - all the individual vent stacks tie
together into a pair of 3" diameter stacks at one end of the roof.
Ordinarily you're limited in the horizontal run to some fraction of the
vertical run, but per code if you go one pipe size larger than the
requirement for the fixtures on that vent you can run an unlimited
horizontal length. I did manage to keep some slope on everything...
John.
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