John Lansing

While plumbing with single stacks was being installed throughout Europe, Miami was attempting to do the same in the 1990s but instead with proprietary products that begin gaining a reputation for flooding condos with sewage.

Here’s a cutaway of one of these proprietary fittings.

While plumbing with single stacks was being installed throughout Europe, Miami was attempting to do the same in the 1990s but instead with proprietary products that begin gaining a reputation for flooding condos with sewage.

With drainage, it’s generally recommended to limit the amount of directional changes but the Sovent deliberately does this at every floor. This also makes it very tricky to clean out a blockage as well without using a special process with non-standard equipment designed for cleaning Sovent systems.

I was just sent these photos of a Philadelphia single stack. Missing is the typical web of vent piping that you see in American and Canadian residential buildings.

The Barbican still looks amazing but can’t say the same for the Parthenon once the columns are swapped out with vinyl ones from Home Depot.

I knew getting to and from the train station was going to be annoying but the infrequent bus service made it even worse than I imagined, in addition to weird station locations and no card payments.

While bag scanners are not common for HSR in Europe, they are for HSR in Spain. These are just like the ones you see on subways in China but didn’t seem to slow things down too much.

I knew getting to and from the train station was going to be annoying but the infrequent bus service made it even worse than I imagined, in addition to weird station locations and no card payments.

Zaragoza, once a 1st century Roman colony under Cesar Augustus, has some nice 2000 year old bathhouse and sewer ruins.

They demolished the latrines and built a bathing pool over top.

Zaragoza, once a 1st century Roman colony under Cesar Augustus, has some nice 2000 year old bathhouse and sewer ruins.

The U.S. Department of Commerce published a report in 1951 to support an effort to create a harmonized code for all 50 states. In 1955, ASME published the A40.8 National Standard Plumbing Code as an American Standard Association (predecessor to ANSI) publication.

The proceeds of the project were cannibalized by other standards development organizations in the wake of the A40.8 dissolution, with significant sections of the text and tables appearing a few years later in the NSPC (a dwindling model code now only used in NJ) and the IPC in 1995.

The U.S. Department of Commerce published a report in 1951 to support an effort to create a harmonized code for all 50 states. In 1955, ASME published the A40.8 National Standard Plumbing Code as an American Standard Association (predecessor to ANSI) publication.

This mini-doc from DW on modular residential construction talks a bit about the recent industry failures in the US and pinpoints inconsistent building codes as one of the major barriers. Interestingly, this issue was also highlighted by HUD’s Operation Breakthrough in the 1960s and 1970s.

This bathroom module shown in the video is missing something that would make it illegal in the US: vents for to sanitary drainage system. HUD decided the vents should be omitted for modular housing and successfully and thoroughly demonstrated that omitting these vents (single stack) worked!

Walking around London looking like a guy who lost his F-150 in the Home Depot parking lot, trying to make the case that it’s everyone else that doesn’t belong there.

I’d buy an abandoned apartment building and fill it with plumbing systems designed in accordance with German or Dutch building standards (highly illegal in the US) and run experiments to demonstrate superior performance. I’d pay for flights/hotels to bring every inspector in the country to see it.

You can’t just send AHJs to see these systems in Europe because then it’s not American anymore and it doesn’t count.

It’s an East/West divide between the pedestal and squating WC that persists today. Squatting WCs were produced in France in the mid 19th century when plumbing was still a rare luxury and predates the siphonic WC now ubiquitous in the US. They worked well and are the only early WC still common today.

I wonder what this map would look like if we had more rational plumbing codes that didn’t represent such a cost barrier. Another part of this story is the cost of traditional wastewater disposal methods for non-sewered sanitation (i.e. septic tanks), which are also unviable in many areas.

If it’s not immediately obvious, indigenous nations are disproportionately impacted by lack of access to sanitation.

This is also more cost-effective from a plumbing standpoint because it keeps the fixtures closer together (less piping). It gives users more privacy while directly addressing the wait-time gender disparity at congested restrooms. The Victorian separation of (bathroom) spheres has run its course.

The insistence on using SI over AI is a clear attempt to obfuscate another war the US has been waging and losing for over century against the Système international d'unités, costing Americans between $1.603 billion to $2.506 billion per year.