Sold out seats for the @thewaroncars.bsky.social book launch tour in Vancouver @uytaelee.bsky.social @brooklynspoke.bsky.social @sgoodyear.bsky.social

Now arriving at Costco Station. Doors to your left.

Checking out the latest plumbing products in the Canadian construction market at CIPHEX West in Vancouver.

What’s also bad is when a mechanical engineer decides to combine exhaust ducts from multiple bathrooms and the path of least resistance is your bathroom. Same with the kitchen exhaust. Not a typical installation practice but this discussion comes up a lot in design for some one-off unit floor plans.

Vancouver is like a fictional city that somehow actually exists. It’s no wonder all the movies are shot here.

Typical sanitary drainage configuration for larger aisle-layout bathrooms in California vs what would be designed/installed in Europe. The one to the left requires double the amount of piping and labor while also having 8 penetrations through the floor rather than 4, each requiring fire-stopping.

Interiors contractors (装修队) demonstrating the design and installation of an apartment bathroom in China. You can see there’s a dedicated connection to the WC stack and another for the wash drainage stack, which passes through a common trap (中央排水汇集器).

As @tedgrunewald.bsky.social noted, the Vitrolite in the White House bathroom was irreplaceable. As @pipedreaming.bsky.social noted, the Flushometer toilet had a lot more flush than the Kohler that replaced it. I complain about the marble floor and lack of grab bars, which make it a deathtrap.

The Quebec Construction Code allows unvented drains for sinks in some circumstances, but requires an incredibly deep trap seal (4 inches/100 mm) for such an installation. Not only is this 2x the depth of what is required in most European countries but it’s also less sanitary.

If you walk into the plumbing section of a Canadian Tire, you’d think you were in the US. The allowable materials, products, and methods in the National Plumbing Code of Canada are nearly identical to what you’ll find in the IPC/UPC.

When it rains a lot I go to the St. George Rainway to watch water going in and out of things. So, here’s a thread for those of you similarly enthralled… @greenestcity.bsky.social @cityofvancouver.bsky.social

“We” did not land on the moon. You guys left without me and I’m still mad about it.

To make the Lincoln bathroom more "appropriate for the Lincoln era", he appears to have tossed the vintage flushometer valve water closet and replaced it with a generic lower mid-range toilet available at Home Depot (Kohler Highline).

The Thames River was one of the victims of the Industrial Revolution and its fate was sealed for a century when the 1844 Metropolitan Buildings Act required sewer connections at each building, discharging raw sewage directly into the Thames.

Here’s a great example of a pressure imbalance mystery in a sanitary drainage system.

Very important to keep the door closed to the half bathroom if you have a squatting WC and small pets.

Spain has some of the most restrictive limits on single stack drainage in Europe (only for <7 floor buildings), which would appear to anyone in the US as the most advanced, game-changing plumbing concept. A 4 inch (100 mm) single stack can be used in the rest of Europe for ~20 stories!

It would be cool to see some cities and states coordinating a restart of Operation Breakthrough or something similar.

“Precedent has been our guide, and as a result, we have become unbendingly orthodox to such an extent that originality is now viewed with suspicion, and initiative and its counterpart progress have suffered proportionately.” W. M. Wild 1934 on the transition from two-pipe to one-pipe in the UK

Anyone have a copy of the 1991 or 1994 UPC? There’s text that was added into the UPC prohibiting the single stack specifically in one of these editions and I can’t find them online. What’s particularly wild is any configuration not listed is not permitted, so someone really went overboard here.

This reminds me of the recycled water treatment building in the Nye suburb of Aarhus, Denmark.

Just realized today marks one year since I started this account. 🎂

Current mood in Portland

The Italian-style standalone bidets are the worst of the bidets, but are infinitely more civilized than not having one at all. And they (plus the window requirement) make the bathroom big enough that you can often chop one old-school Italian bathroom into two:

This is an easy/low cost add during the building design phase but is almost never included except for very high end housing. The cutoff is generally around +$10 million for condos.

This issue along with the fact that bidets require larger bathrooms, are reasons the bidet/WC fixtures are much more common in new construction in many regions.

Wyly and Eaton’s formulas for terminal velocity and flow capacity in sanitary drainage stacks form the basis of plumbing codes used on every continent today. Hard to overestimate the impact of NISTs work on plumbing internationally.

The ASA A40.8 was the national plumbing code that never was. The code committee dissolved before a second edition could be produced due to lack of consensus in the 1960s. This code was even developed under the guidance of Robert Wyly at NIST, whose work created the foundation for drainage theory.

Sunset over Portland

Dishwashers are great because you can use as many bowls, plates, and utensils as you want and it will still take the same amount of time and water to clean them at the end of the day.

Richard Scarry’s conception of sanitary drainage systems (labeled here as “dirty water”) appears identical to how some of the earliest plumbing systems were installed in the US and UK in the early 19th century.

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Natural gas is incredibly dangerous and it’s wild to me that we’re still putting it in new construction. Here’s why this requirement in NYC is entirely missing the mark.🧵

Another beautiful Saturday in ‘War Ravaged Portland’.

In 1882, you may not have known anyone with plumbing in the US, but you at least knew who was in the “White House”, so installation bragging rights were utilized by American manufacturers. There were no ASTM, ANSI, ASSE, ect product listings so it seems they were stretching for a seal of approval.

the pipe posting to hired post pipeline

Super excited to join the Center for Building!

Exciting announcement: the Center for Building has hired @pipedreaming.bsky.social as our Director of Plumbing Standards Research and Development! preview.mailerlite.io/emails/webvi...

Waste collection in Edinburgh takes advantage of the abundance of street space typically reserved for car parking. Since containers aren’t stored in a dedicated room in a building or in a private alley (less common in Edinburgh), they can be shared between multiple buildings.

He really left us his legacy. I’m constantly blown away by the quality and quantity of projects he completed.

Brazilian plumbing refuses to be constrained by right angles.

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New apartments in China are often constructed and sold as core and shell (毛坯房) spaces, similar to how many commercial buildings are development and sold in the US. These are then customized and finished by an interiors contractor team (装修队) once sold to an owner.

I often hear people suggest that water efficient fixtures negatively impact the performance of drainage systems, but I think a more accurate assessment would be that the engineering guidance and plumbing codes have failed to keep up with the innovation of plumbing fixtures.

Julia West is nearing completion. The building sits on a site less than 4800 SF (446 m^2) and is 12 stories tall.

I reserved a few documents on late 19th century American plumbing for review at the New York Public Library. I’ve found that US publications on this subject are more likely to have been digitized compared to elsewhere (except Germany), but there are still plenty just sitting in archives.

There’s a preserved tenement from 1863 in the Lower Eastside you can tour, originally built without indoor plumbing but added near the end of the 19th century.

These characteristic wooden domestic water tanks in NYC help ensure that at least 8 psi/0.6 bar of water pressure is maintained at plumbing fixtures in the building below. Water is pumped from the lower pressure water mains below the street to the elevated tank using an electric transfer pump.

Guy came down from Vermont and says we need dense walkable cities.