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Taking Care Of Your Home & Business Plumbing System | Happy World Plumbing Day 2015

“A Royal Flush Is Better Than A Full House!”

Did you know its World Plumbing Day!?

WPC mission statement is: “To promote the role of plumbing in improving public health and safeguarding the environment, by uniting the World Plumbing Industry, for the benefit of all.”

Join us in saying a great big THANK YOU to everyone (especially our hard working plumbers and technician’s) who work hard everyday to ensure we have clean, safe water and that our sewage continues to flow! It can be a tough and sometimes very tiring job!

As a part of World Plumbing Day and our appreciation for indoor plumbing, clean healthy water and safe sewage systems we must also remember the importance of water conservation in our daily use and taking care of our home and business plumbing systems.

A few things to remember to help conserve our water and plumbing systems!

  • Shut the water off when not in use.
  • Upgrade to a low water consumption use toilet.
  • Install a new shower head.
  • Ensure all plumbing leaks are promptly repaired.
  • Upgrade old water lines to ensure clean, proper and efficient water flow.
  • Only run your dishwasher when it is full.
  • Replace old appliances with new energy star appliances (dishwasher and washing machine).
  • Install a water softener which will clean your clothes better and rinse soap off your body, dishes and clothes easier.
  • If you notice your drains are slow or not draining properly, have this investigated before it causes a back up into your basement.
  • Space out your water usage rather than doing large amounts of laundry in one day (which can flood your septic system) space it out over the evenings of the week and only do a couple loads on the weekends.
  • Use a rain barrel to catch rain water for use in gardens.
  • Ensure you have a proper septic system – septic tank and weeping bed.
  • Know the location of your septic system and weeping bed. When your home was built there would have been a septic plan.
  • Ensure the septic tank lids are always accessible – this is especially important during the winter if you have a back up. There are risers and plastic lids that can be installed which are easier accessible at anytime of the year.
  • Check your septic tank yearly to ensure it is draining properly and pump when the sludge build up is lessening the capacity of your tank. (Approx 3-5 yrs) When in doubt always call a professional.
  • If you have a garborator in your home ensure your septic tank is pumped yearly – or if you are on a septic put your food scraps in a composter.
  • Never put any kind of grease down your drains or into your septic system.
  • If you have a septic system be careful what cleaners you use in the toilet – heavy bleach cleaners can kill micro-organisms important in breaking down and treating waste water.
  • Do not flush paper towels, baby wipes, feminine products, kitty litter, condoms or anything other than toilet paper down the toilet.
  • Do not pour any chemicals into the septic tank – the system is designed to work with the natural biological’s which enter the tank to break down.
  • Never drive over, park on or build over top of your weeping bed. In the winter it is important to never plow the snow above your weeping bed, this will help insulate and prevent freezing in colder winters.

How does your Plumbing System Work???

Here are a few pictures to give you visual of the system!

This is a typical home septic system.
septic-diagram2

A colour coded diagram of a home’s basic plumbing system.

home-plumbing-system

A home’s plumbing system coming out to the main sewer.

houseplumb1

For those of you connected to town water and sewer,
InflowandInfiltrationDiagram

World Plumbing Day ~ Celebrate & Appreciate Plumbers

It is World Plumbing Day, March 11th, every year, everywhere…

I am sharing some valuable information from the World Plumbing Day website.

The key elements from this epidemic that are addressed by the plumbing industry worldwide:

DESIGN: It all begins with the design of the product itself. A trained engineer will know

which materials are viable options for the production of a P-trap and call for these

specifications in his design.

PRODUCTION: Next is the manufacturer. If there is an ISO 9001 Quality Management

System in place, audited regularly by an accredited third party body, the manufacturer is

likely to recognize a deficient material being used in a product and make the correction

before the faulty product can go to market — in this case, the bolts that rusted,

compromising the water seal in the floor drain trap.

STANDARDS TESTING: Similarly, this defect could have been caught during testing at

a properly accredited product-testing laboratory. Standards dictate the allowable

materials, design, function, etc. for a given product. If the product standard calls for

galvanized bolts, for instance, any product not using the specified bolts would not pass

testing to show compliance with the applicable standard(s).

PRODUCT CERTIFICATION: Without meeting the required standards, the product

cannot be certified and listed by a third-party certification body suitably accredited to

grant Marks of Conformity to products. Authorities Having Jurisdiction (a city’s building

inspector, for instance) look for these Marks of Conformity when determining which

plumbing products they will allow for installation within their municipality.

CODES: The adoption of building codes within a municipality goes a long way toward

ensuring the safety of a city’s residents from system failures such as the one at the Amoy

Gardens.

INSTALLATION: A workforce highly trained and educated to the existing code language

is essential to the proper installation of a plumbing system. If the plumber who installed

the P-trap at the Amoy Gardens was properly certified to perform this work, it is quite

possible he would have recognized the potential for failure in this particular product.

INSPECTION: In the same vein, a similarly certified plumbing and mechanical inspector

might have red tagged this installation during his code-dictated on-site inspection of the

installer’s work. This red tag could have required the installer to remove the faulty P-trap

and replace it with the proper part before the plumbing system could be approved as

being compliant.

MAINTENANCE: Over the life of a plumbing system, periodic maintenance is required.

The chances of the system continuing to function in the safest manner possible grow

exponentially when the person performing that maintenance is trained professional

plumber. During routine maintenance of the building’s plumbing system, the failed P-trap

might have been discovered and repaired before the SARS Coronavirus was introduced to

it.

When all of these steps work in concert with each other, it drastically reduces the

likelihood of the type of failure that facilitated the spread of the SARS virus in Hong

Kong. In developing nations, many of these steps are often bypassed, with increased

health risks illustrated by statistics; for example, as many as 7.5 percent of deaths in India

are attributed to water and sanitation related causes, according to statistics from the

World Health Organization — a staggering figure in a nation of 1.1 billion people.

World Plumbing Day seeks to provide additional awareness of these goals and how tools

such as “Health Aspects of Plumbing” contribute toward reaching these humanitarian

goals.

Safe, clear drinking water and basic sanitation is possible in any nation, big or small, when simple, sound plumbing practices are adopted.

Contact www.worldplumbing.org to download your copy of Health Aspects of Plumbing today.