Problem with Hard Piped Washers

 

Many laundry equipment installs involve taking the large chassis washers and instead of draining them into a drain trough that is built in the ground or an above ground manufactured drain trough, they are hard piped from the machine drain directly into the drain system. This method is not to code in all areas of the country as some areas do require large chassis washers to drain into a trough. There are advantages to hard piping:
1. saves the cost of digging a trough into concrete or buying a manufactured trough
2. don't have to try and retrofit a drain trough inside a narrow bulkhead
3. you can "hide" all the pipes inside a bulkhead unlike some situations where a drain trough might be in the open
4. no moldy smell of an unclean trough wafting in the store
5. there is nothing to clean out like an in ground or manufactured trough...

-OR IS THERE?

The disadvantages of hard piping are:
1. possibly illegal in your area to hard pipe machines into a drain line as local requirements might state that gravity drained machines have to dump into a "holding container" like a drain trough
2. hard pipes are usually hidden inside the bulkhead and an "out of sight-out of mind" situation develops so the pipes are rarely inspected for leaks or blockages until something breaks
3. all of the debris that gets caught in the pipes and stops the flow of water away from the machine and potentially keeping debris in the drain valve area longer resulting in stuck drain valves
4. debris can also cause the washer to drain slower leading to potential machine errors that could stop the cycle and cause an upset customer  

If you hard pipe your machines you still need to clean them on a regular basis. As you can see in the pictures below there are tons of coins, nails, hair pins, etc. in these pipes and it combines together to form big chunks after a time. How often you have to clean them depends on your usage, however make sure you install clean out plugs and don't glue or "permanently attach" the hard pipes to the washer drains so you can easily detach them and clean out the pipes.
At this store this is only four of the 24 hard pipe connections.
If these had been cleaned more often not only would the owner have not had the service issues and customer issues he had, but all of the money could have been saved because it would have been in usable condition. That is a few hundred bucks from this store easily.

Clean your pipes!
Ev
A Heck of A Nice Guy