The first evidence of a mechanical flushing toilet dates to 1596, invented by a Sir John Harington in England and ensuing centuries saw European and American inventors patent designs for workable toilets. So why did it take until the late 19th Century for indoor plumbing to finally catch on? The main reason is because most people thought moving the toilet indoors was a bad idea, and who can blame them? They stunk up the house!
Indoor plumbing did not really come alive until the 1880’s. The real hero of modern plumbing is not any of the toilet tinkerers, but a New York City sanitary engineer by the name of George Waring, Jr., who throughout his career crusaded for better sanitation and wrote numerous books and articles detailing how to achieve it. Perhaps the most important of these books was his 1876 publication of The Sanitary Drainage of Houses and Towns, which offered detailed instruction about the placement of plumbing vents.
Vents enable drains to flow freely by allowing air into the drainage systems. This avoids creating a vacuum that prevents or slows drainage from occurring at toilets and other fixtures.
To see this effect, try turning a bottle of water or any other liquid upside down. The liquid does not flow freely out of the bottle’s narrow opening. A little will spill out until some air comes into the bottle to fill the vacuum created by the suction of the water spilling out.
Now try the same experiment, but try punching a little hole into the bottom of your bottle before you turn it upside down. Because air can easily enter the bottle, the liquid flows much more smoothly out of the bottle mouth. This is what venting does to your plumbing system. Without vents, indoor plumbing would remain a bad idea.
Plumbing vents also allow sewer gases to be vented safely outdoors. Sewer gases accumulate both from the outside, backing up inside a building from a public sewer or private septic system, and from the inside as toilet waste flows through the building pipes. Plumbing vents typically exit above the roof line of a home or building so they don’t leave unpleasant odors and possibly dangerous gases inside the building.
Venting is more than simply punching a bunch of air holes in a draining system. For a plumbing system to work right the vents must be of sufficient size and the right distance from the fixtures served. Over the years George Waring and other sanitation engineers figured out the correct formulas, which are now incorporated into tables and adopted by plumbing codes around the country to guide plumbers when they install plumbing systems in new buildings.
Many people look at plumbing as only about turning wrenches and other relatively simple mechanical tasks. It’s a lot more complicated than that. We see some real bungled do-it-yourself projects from people who know little about the importance of venting.
[coupongen id=”5″ align=”center”]