Plumbing the Hard Way

Plumbing has never been my forte and numerous floods in my various residences through the years will attest to this. Today I learned about drains, and it made me angry. Readers already in on the big secret about drains will find my antics humourous, sad, or both. My kichen sink drain started leaking about a month ago. I put a plastic tub under it and ignored it for a while. When the leak was in it's infancy, the tub method worked well. It was out of site and out of mind, and the water evaporated fast enough that I didn't have to think about it. The leak was an ambitious leak though, and it had no intention of confining itself to the tub for ever.

The leak matured, and for the past couple weeks I couldn't get through a batch of dishes without the plastic tub filling or over-flowing. Since I had the day off today, I decided to fix it. I examined the series of tubes beneath the sink. It was all held together with pvc nuts and gaskets. It seemed way over engineered.

Everything missing was leaking.

I guess the idea of all the nuts and gaskets is that it can be easily taken apart in case of a clog or a lost item in the drain, but in over 30 years of using and observing kitchen sinks I have never had to take it apart to clear a clog, or retrieve a lost item, nor had I seen anyone else have to do this. The standard sink drain design seems like it introduces many points of failure, and promotes leaks. My sink was leaking from every one of these stupid joints on one side. I had no immediate plans to try and stuff a pot roast down the sink or small valuable items, so I decided I would replace all that crap with regular glued pvc joints. I measured the pipe and off to I went to Lowes. I came home with my pipe and soon noticed that it didn't quite fit. The drain pipe wasn't quite 1" pcv and wasn't quite 11/4" pvc.

I cut off a piece of the drain pipe to drain with me and went to the Home Depot this time. I confirmed that it indeed did not match any available size of pvc pipe. Eventually I asked a balding guy in a home depot apron who seemed to know something about plumbing, and I asked him what was going on and he said "oh drain pipe," and took me an aisle over to the drain pipe area. As it turns out drain pipe is like pvc pipe, but twice and flimsy and twice as expensive and all the bits have these annoying screw together connectors to keep you from gluing it. This made me angry. It must be some plumber/drain pipe manufacture's conspiracy. It is theoretically easy to work on but unrealiable, flimsy, over-priced, and in practice not that easy to work on. I did get it fixed, evantually. Yes, it is all lop-sidded and crummy looking, but with the fittings I had, that was the best I could do. Actually it is pissing my off again just thinking about it. I'm just going to stop thinking about it until it breaks again.