Floor drain
youstina
| Posted in General Questions on
Im in the process of building my home , is it a good idea to have a floor drain in the bathroom or not because it is not common here in US to have it and i would like to konw if it has more cons or pros
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Replies
yousinda,
All the fixtures in a bathroom (toilet, sink and tub) have overflows or drains to stop them flooding. I don't think I've ever seen a floor drain in a bathroom.
Because the floor is flat, if you did get a leak or somehow one fixture did overflow, there is no mechanism to make it go down the drain and not just flood under the door and into the rest of the house.
Toilets don't have anything to keep them from flooding.
The overflows in the sink and tub are useless if the drain is clogged. They're vestigial.
DC,
Toilets have an overflow in the tank if the fill valve fails. They can only flood if they are clogged when flushed - while you are presumably watching them.
Sinks and tubs can only flood while being filled. The chances of the drain being clogged coinciding with the rare occasions when you forgot to turn off the water and were using the overflow are vanishingly slim.
One thing that does worry me about toilets and sinks are their supply lines, which can burst.
If you did decide to include a floor drain in a bathroom where do you think would be the best location? Behind the toilet? In the vanity kick-space?
I occasionally design it into homes that have folks using a wheel chair to an open shower, or in a mud-bathroom, typically in farm houses or people that work in dirty jobs. The entire bathroom should be design as a wet area.
We recently build a small house in Australia , where code required a floor drain in bathrooms, and an integrated waterproof system from floor to ceiling. I'm not aware of any cons other than cost.
Yeah, the floor drain only makes sense if you're going to waterproof the floor. Maybe not all the way to the ceiling but you've got to go a little bit up the walls too.
I have them at home and have inadvertently made use of it a number of times. Without the floor drain, there would have been a lot more damage, in a multi story structure it is worth the effort.
The simplest way to get it is to build a curbless shower into the bathroom. The pieces for these can be had in kit for not much extra, about the only additional effort is dropping the subfloor under the shower pan a bit (or raising the rest of the bath) and waterproofing the the tiled area plus a couple of inches up the wall. Outside the shower waterproofing is pretty easy with one of the many roll on membranes, for the shower area best to use parts of the kit. Don't need to slope the whole bath, even if flat and with a raised threshold at the door, water will drain into the shower, of course a bit of slope makes it work even better.
Our second floor "hall" bath (i.e. not the "main" bath) is also a laundry area, so I did Schluter Kerdi on the floor and just a bit up the wall in certain areas. There is an emergency floor drain underneath the washing machine. The entry threshold is about 1/4" above the plane of tile.
You often see pans with drains specified under washing machines, but I find that they (1) tend to crack over time and that (2) while they help with a leaky washing machine, they likely won't do anything for a broken supply hose.
Time will tell if my strategy has any merit, but I do like knowing that I've bought at least a little time in the event of a leak.
insaneirish,
I agree laundry rooms should always have a drain.
Floodchek makes virtually unbreakable supply hoses, but I don't know if they are still in business.
https://www.basementsystems.ca/basement/waterproofing/products/home-plumbing/washer-hoses.html