Minimizing Plumbing Fixtures by Design

One of the main design aspects of building a home is how best to serve the plumbing needs for your kitchen, toilet and bath. These places in the modern home, be it a condominium, apartment, townhouse, chalet or a mansion, require prudent planning to ensure the least plumbing fixtures are situated farthest from living quarters like bedrooms.

This is a basic premise architects and builders adhere to. The modern homes concentrate its plumbing structure in just one location, often within kitchen and bath areas, rendering only a few vertical configuration of waste and water pipes and avoiding long horizontal runs that are not only unsightly, but can could cause blockage of waste content since they are not properly angled to cause content freefall.

This concentration not only saves the builder on the costs of plumbing fixtures and fittings it also ensures that your construction money can afford the best quality plumbing that can last generations. The added icing on the cake, as it were, is that you minimize exposure of more areas to potential leaks and seepage of waste and water should the plumbing break down. Here are some designs tips:

• Try to minimize on toilets and baths. It is better to have just one water closet often used by many family members and therefore frequently flushed, than to have more but less frequently used. If you have to put in more than one toilet and bath, see that they are located on the periphery of the house, not in the interior where horizontal plumbing will need to run through ceiling or floor beams needlessly.
• In a multi story townhouse or apartment, just like in a building, locate the water closets along a single vertical plumbing main connecting your toilets and baths. That means, they should be on top of each other. This makes plumbing not only efficient, but easy to install. You can get good discounts on wholesale plumbing fixtures when designed in this manner.
• Never have a sewer plumbing run on ceiling beams that cross living spaces unless you are sure they are of the highest quality material and fitting. The last thing you want, if you were the occupant of the house, is to suffer sewer gas leaking out of faulty joints or defective traps. The farther they are from the main living quarters, the better.
• It is common practice to enclose plumbing structures in bowls, tubs and sinks with decorative and tight woodworks. This should be discouraged. Encasing them creates damp enclosed spaces that will eventually become filthy and foul smelling which can be prevented by ensuring free air current around these fixtures and making them easily accessible for cleaning.