My contractor is stumped! Need a creative solution...

[orfeus123]

Hi all,

Grateful to find you. I'm not an expert on anything... just trying to solve problems.

Recently bought a house in the rocky Catskills, doing basic remodeling... but running into a problem figuring out how to drain the kitchen sink. The previous "solution" was a pipe that pumped the waste water into the neighbor's yard. No joke.

Here's why this is tricky...

1. There's a door between the sink and the bathroom... so we can't get the pitch needed through the walls.

2. Through the floor is problematic as well: There is almost no pitch to run a drain pipe from the sink to the bathroom where the main pipe to the septic is found (about 10 feet away). Under the kitchen floor is the floor support joists... I think 6 or 8 inches... and then dirt. The house is on a hill, so much of it has a crawl space... just not at this side of the house.

3. Even if we were to install a pump, the problem is that the floor joists run perpendicular to the direction the drain pipe has to go. In other words, we'd have to notch the support joists, and the concern is that it would simply weaken the support (the notch would be very close to the end of the boards... probably two feet away max)

4. Know nothing of grey water systems, but from my research, New York doesn't allow for any kind of grey water system for this situation.

5. If there was any need to, there's no good way to dig any significantly deep holes in the ground. There's a LOT of rock very close to the surface in this part of the Catskills. For example, my neighbor needed to dig holes for fence posts... literally had to get a jack hammer to go a few feet (after everything else failed).

I think that covers the challenges...

Any ideas????

THANK YOU!

Mitch

 

[Diehard]

If you install a pump you wouldn't have to run it under the floor.
Not knowing exactly what you have to work with, I can't say much about where you could run it. But if pumped you wouldn't have to worry about sufficient pitch as you mention initially.

One person on this forum just moved a wash sink from one side of a room to the other and simply ran the pipe up and over and dropped back down where he could tie into the existing drain lines.

You have to be careful not to have a pump with a discharge capacity that exceeds the capacity of a gravity drain line that you dump into.

They do offer a selection of small prefab sumps with integral pump that can fit under a sink. Or next to it if that works better for you.
I assume you have at least a 3" main drain that you can dump into and which is properly vented.

 

[orfeus123]

Thanks for that. By up and over, I'm assuming you mean up and over the door that stands in the way... We could do that. It would mean ripping out a bunch of walls. But if that's the only way...

 

[Diehard]

Like I said, I don't know what you have to work with.

Up and over could be up to the ceiling across and through the wall. Then boxed in so it's not exposed.

You had mentioned, "you can't get the pitch needed through the walls". So is through the walls an option since you don't need a pitch?

And it sounds like you can't go under the floor support joists. I would think a notch for a 1-1/4" pipe could be reinforced with a section of a sister joist. But you'd have to check that out, of course.

So if you can't go under, over, or around and you can't dig a hole or a trench deep enough to get below the frost line, sounds like your only option is to move the sink into the bath room.