How do toilets, sinks, showers, and everything connect with a cities sewer?
Got my answer,thanks.
In: Engineering
Through a pipe from the building to the street where it connects to the city pipe which goes to the sewage treatment plant
Aiding some of your thoughts –
It’s really important that your “Waste” piping isn’t just liquid through an through, it wouldn’t flow if that were the case. There is a second pipe, called a ‘vent’ pipe that keeps your waste piping ‘breathing’. So when you flush a toilet, essentially the waste water ‘falls’ down from your toilet, inside a pipe, into your home’s “sanitary main”, the vent allows this whole system to be ‘breathing’, which I mean prevents and clogs and things forming vacuums and blocking the entire piping system.
Your sanitary main gets connected to a bigger waste main in the street and it’s a series of bigger pipes back to the sewage treatment plant. If you have areas with hills or valleys or something, you’ll have big ‘pump houses’ which now that I’ve mentioned them you’ll notice scattered around, they look fancy garden sheds with lots of pipes around on street corners. These pump houses *pump* the dookies up-hill to reach the plant.
Treatment plants use a mixture of filtration (separating out the dookies, condoms, New Jersey Beach Whistles & other solid stuff) and fermentation to breakdown the waste in something less toxic and then they dilute it with tons and tons of clean water typically by dumping it into the ocean or a river.
Many areas in the US also use a conjoined storm water/waste water system which means even modest rain fall can overwhelm the treatment plants and they just open the sluice and dump the waste/rain directly into the ocean/river and hope for the best.
Pretty vague, but I will give this a shot for you. Bathrooms have fixtures, not appliances. Meaning they are static and add to permanence of the home. Appliances are in your home as replaceable machines. Although fixtures are replaceable they are more permanent.
Your sewer system is connected to he city mainline service. You have a sewer main for all the sinks, bath/showers toiles in your house. They are all connected one main drain that connects to the municipal main drain into the large sewer system in the street. A vent above the improvement structure (such as your house) helps the air gas breathe to allow a drain into this system. What exactly are you interested in?
Each fixture in your bathroom has a drain pipe. These join together into a slightly larger pipe. If you have another bathroom that shares a wall, the larger pipe from each will join together into yet another larger pipe. Same thing for your kitchen, basement, or anywhere you have an appliance with a drain inside your home. Eventual these all join together into another even larger pipe that goes outside and out near the curb to join another even larger pipe, the city main. This main will go down your street until it joins with another streets main, in yet another larger pipe. And so on until it gets to the sewer treatment plant.
So basically, you start with something like a 1 inch pipe and by the time it reaches the sewer plant it may be up to 18 or 24 inches. Maybe even larger in larger cities.
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