Under the Choko Tree By Nevin Sweeney

The Spa Bath and the Greywater Outlet

A few years ago we had our bathroom renovated, which included among other things replacing the bath with a spa, let’s face it, you gotta have some luxury in your life! As part of the renovation I did ask them to put a two way valve in the drain line so that I could run the greywater either down to the sewer or into the back yard and onto the fruit trees. They did as I asked, gluing in a blocked off pipe into the line into the back yard to prevent leakage and left the valve running to sewer until I got a chance to plumb it in properly.

The valve they used - less than $5 at a local hardware

Well, life gets busy and it was a number of years before I got the chance to finish the job. To complete things I got hold of a cap the same size as the outlet pipe and drilled a 25mm hole in it, then used silicon to attach a barbed irrigation fitting suitable to fit a 25mm hose. While I considered using garden hose it is only 12mm and would not drain quickly enough when the shower was in use.

Under the house

Having done the easy stuff, I ran some of the hose through one of the under-house vents which was in roughly the right area so when the time was right I could force it onto the barbed fitting. I then crawled under the house with the fittings, glue, torch and my trusty saw to remove the blank plug and install my pre-prepared cap with the barb on it. Installing the cap proved as easy to do as it could have been, lying on my back in amongst the spiders and dirt (I’m getting too old for this crap!), anyway, job done.

All that was left to do was to turn the valve from discharge to sewer to discharge to back yard……easy! Well, maybe not so. For some reason the valve simply would not turn, regardless of what I did. I tried heating up the outside of the valve with a gas flame to break what was holding it, but no go. I even sent my son-in-law under there to try his hand at it (I told you I was getting too old for this crap) but to no avail, it was stuck solid.

The original discharge pipe, blocked by a cap

There is a lesson here! When you have stuff like this put in, try and operate it as soon as they are finished installing it. It is my belief that some of the glue they used to install it in got into the moving part and gummed it shut, but because it was now a few years down the track, any warranty period had well and truly expired.

My cap with the barbed fitting siliconed on

Due to the way it was constructed down there, and all glued together, it was not just a case of simply replacing the valve, and whole stack of pipework needed to be replaced too. In the end I broke down and got a local plumbing company in and they did a great job of crawling under the house, fixing the problem and then actually checking to make sure it worked before they left. So we now have a functioning process for reusing greywater from the spa and if we get a spate of wet weather I can crawl under the house (*sigh*) and turn the valve so the spa empties to the sewer again.  Woo hoo!

In place with the hose heading out

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