How & Why with DTI
How & Why with DTI
Don't Blow the Commode - How to avoid Blowing Up or Burping Toilets
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Blowing up or burping toilets is a common problem when cleaning sewers. In this episode, brought to you by the Enz Bulldog Antiblast Nozzle, Mike Renner and Ed Fitzgerald give insight on what causes blowing up or burping toilets, and what steps we can take to prevent this from happening. For more information: https://dohenycompany.com/dti-podcast/
This episode of how and why with dti is brought to you by the ENZ Bulldog antiblast nozzle developed to dramatically reduced the potential of blowing up or burping toilets. The ENZ Bulldog antiblast nozzle is a great nozzle for all around cleaning. It's slow rotation long with a combination of 45 and 90 degree jets helps prevent blowing or burping toilets when ran at 1100 psi, which in most trucks equates to around 1600 psi at the hose reel. It's low maintenance design make this nozzle your go to when blowing up toilets is not an option. If you want to prevent angry homeowners chasing your crews in the end anti blast nozzle is the nozzle for you. contact any of the Jack Doheny Company coast to coast locations for more information on the ENZ Bulldog antiblast nozzle. Welcome back to how and why dti. I'm your Host Mike Renner. Today I've got again with me, Ed Fitzgerald. And today we're going to talk about don't blow the commode, or as a lot of people call it blowing up or burping toilets, what causes it? And how can we prevent it?
Unknown Speaker :First thing we have to understand when we talk about blowing up toilets or burning them is what causes it and I think you've got a lot of insight that you've experienced once you explain a little bit what's causing blowing up or burping toilets. Yeah, you've used the terms blowing up a burpee, nothing really doesn't blow up, you're forcing air up through the toilet. Historically that has to do with the venting system on the home that used first of all understanding the venting system on the home and why it happens and then we'll understand how we can prevent it in the pipe cleaning process. But up in through about the early 80s we used to run before and fun stacks out of most of our homes. My house was built with 49 studs, a four inch vent stack, and within three feet of that run stack is the toilet, the sink, the bathtub, and they're all tied into it. And the vendors most of us know is exactly what it says it's a fan. It's like putting a straw on a glass of water and putting your thumb on the end lifted up in the water stays in the straw until you lift your thumb off the end of the straw event. What happens when you flush the toilet, it creates a vacuum on the line when you put that big slug of water through there. If there's a vent, we don't have an issue. If there's not event you actually construct the kitchen or the bathroom sink, or the bathroom tub trap dry and you can order back in your house. Well, in about early to mid 80s. They reduced that giant stack to three inch which wasn't a problem in the late 90s when done inch and a half to two inch and to accommodate the prefab homes that can be built in Texas and moved up, moved over to Arizona where plumbing codes were different. They got to be accepted nationwide and the smaller bad thing. If you think about it, the agent supervisor once it goes To the lateral, typically a six inch once it gets to the house with reduced to four. Once it turns up on the floor and goes up, it's now it's three inch and you've got all this air generated by the coup which we'll talk about here in a minute all that air generated by the tool is traveling up that line. And when you start reducing the size of the pipe, you can increase the velocity or the speed of the air. If the houses invented correctly, you stand a chance of pushing the air through the toilet, which is a three inch connection. Typically that can be different sizes and most of them are three inch and they're just kind of off to the toilet and push the material out of the toilet.
Unknown Speaker :That's that's the big reason.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, airflow and venting are a big part of what this is. And then another section that I think sometimes gets overlooked a little bit or you need to understand is, is restricting airflow and what we mean by that is, are you pulling too much material behind that nozzle and there's nowhere for that airflow to go but up that ladder or do you have a belly in the pipe that's causing causing that airflow to be restricted and moving up there. So there's there's other things you have to understand. And then that's where step cleaning comes in and knowing what you're you're cleaning with and the tools you use going in there. So airflow venting and airflow restrictions, that's really is what's causing this issue.
Unknown Speaker :Sure, sure. And
Unknown Speaker :now they kind of know what it's coming from or what's causing it. But how can we repack, we fix it? How can we prevent blowing up the commode?
Unknown Speaker :Let's first understand airflow, how its generated, or how we could reduce it, and it's the amount of air traveling through the sewer line in the cleaning process. As we've seen in the past, on jet angles from judge sprays. This particular grenade, a really good cleaning tool moves a lot of material. And this particular tool has 10 degree jetting on it.
Unknown Speaker :30 degree jumping on it
Unknown Speaker :and you can see the difference in the spray pen 1030 1030 all the way around and we rotate the tool a little bit it gives you a better concept of the difference between 10 and 30 degree there. The lower the number in this case tab. The more you shoot material behind the nozzle which is a good thing if you're trying to move material don't pile it up back here. But the more air it draws, the more I can widen up the spray pattern. The Lesser I'm going to draw with the nozzle. So the tool you're using, you can do to that. One major thing is reduce it to 60 gallons a minute make sure using a 60 gallon until an eight inch pipe which is where most of the problems are too if you can up the spraying go by going to a rotator with 90 and 4547 degree jetting. We'll take a look at here in a second reducing the GPO. Now a lot of is out there. I've been in customers they go oh Do the 711 thing, no gone 711 he says yeah, 1100 psi up 700 psi back mount, you're reducing the pressure on your truck, but you're also reducing the flow on your truck. Not too many of us out there believe 700 psi is actually going to clean a pipe. Yeah, you need to get that pressure in the 1500 psi range, which is what you can do is you're going to see in an animation here shortly, this tool run at 2000 psi, which is a little bit higher, it's going to play the five mile an hour wind. If you could increase the spray angle by say going to 45 degrees, it's good to reduce the forward thrust of the nozzle to some degree, these 90 degree jetting
Unknown Speaker :don't pull any air at all.
Unknown Speaker :The other rotating orifices in the head are 47 degree. So it gives you a good concept of wider I can make that spray pattern that was here I'm and Paul. As you're going to see in the animation. We ran this tool We measured it. And we're pulling 85 mile an hour wind through the pie think of 85 mile an hour whenever we were kidding. We've only done this once you dance driving down the freeway, you're stuck your hand up and when that was a one shot Yeah, smart enough not to do it again. That's what we're dealing with here. 85 mile an hour winds here we're pulling about 24 to 27 mile an hour winds we're running no more than 1600 psi. We run it at 60 gallons a minute it is a rotating head. So it's a good grid grease cutter. Good general maintenance tool. The downside to this tool is it doesn't push materialists far behind the nozzles say a 10 degree jack Well, again, from the aspect of changing the tool and or making sure the mounting systems right on the home that you're working around which is like a near impossible to make sure is some of the things we need to do. Or take a look at.
Unknown Speaker :So when looking at you can look at the things you can control what you can do. It is what you run your nozzle lab and the spraying of the nozzle you put in the pipe
Unknown Speaker :is selecting a nozzle with the proper spray angle. We've talked about this before the standard small rotators we use for cutting grease that only have three jets off the bat, they've got 90 and 45 degree jetting in the rotating and they work well to the rotating head where we have a lot of high degree 47 and 90 degree work really well in this application. This particular energy blast it was specifically designed for that application. Again, this you can see this tool with 15 or 20 degree jetting in the back or the add a blast that has 45 degree joining in the back again this is a one inch tool and you can make them you can make for smaller diameter hoses in the field and you can get them for those subs most of the time that you're wanting to truck causing the problem again, Lauren gallon per minute I don't see this problem on 40 gallon a minute, three quarter inch trailer jets. Although I do see it under one instruction, the guides are trying to push a two gallons a minute into an eight inch pipe, but it's like trying to clean your driveway with a firehouse Yeah, it becomes a little bit of waste of time.
Unknown Speaker :And that's one thing we do want to let under just because you can go in at 2500 doesn't mean you need to every application that's, you know, if you're doing some high end, bigger pipe, things like that, you need that but an eight inch 10 inch line is fairly clean your 60 will clean every bit of that 16 Oh, just as
Unknown Speaker :efficient. You're going to be there for the same period of time, you're going to use less water, the truck doesn't have to work you're sorry, you don't have to run at the start. But the tool has to be set up for that gallon per minute and pressure. And that has to do with the orifice size in the nozzles. Have you seen prior podcasts. That's how we adjust the phone pressure the tube mic, we have a animation that would really show the different vending systems all the way to the air admittance valve, a little bit about what we're talking But before we get to that, in that animation, you're going to see those three homes and you're going to see there all along to the different they will explain it as you're watching it. This is an air admittance valve it could be inch and a half thread like this is it could be two inch inside of here
Unknown Speaker :is a very weak spring
Unknown Speaker :you're you're screwed us ended events that out of the back of your sewer line and come up above the toilet tank. It normally is in the wall of the house when you get in there. And when you flush the toilet and create a vacuum that spring opens up and allows air to be drawn through these openings in the side and draw car on the wall cavity your house and it works. The downside to it is it's totally legal. This was designed for Island kitchen type Island applications where event wasn't feasible to put in when you had open island that was never supposed to be used. And above that. One I looked at the code until little piece of paper came in the box that came with that. So it was called What do you call those directions? I don't know what those are, either. But in those directions, it said not to use it on the toilet. It was not on code. Why do we see them there? People shortcut the code and do what they can do to get around that. But this this is a huge issue in our industry as the air admittance valve being improperly used. Mike, let's take a minute here, run the animation. Talk a little bit about what we're seeing here. This is an animation that our dti group put together we're using the grenade, the grenade running in 2000 psi 60 gallons a minute. As you can see here, the white Chevron's are the airflow once the material builds up behind the nozzle, there have no place to go usually to exit back where the airplane or stop at here we've taken too big of a bite or too big of a step and you can see the airspeed is at about 85 On our might take the next house and give us electrical
Unknown Speaker :action on what's happening so same mainline sewer same nozzle running at the same speed but this is a inch and a half or a two inch vent stack it's got a lot more bins in the pipe turns and a little bit more restricted airflow you know we're running again we take too big of a bite coming out of this, you see the airflow coming up there taking all the beds now it is bubbling up a little bit in the in the toilet but it's not really spraying everywhere and causing huge issues you're gonna have a little bit cleanup but this is still not going to cause you a lot of issues.
Unknown Speaker :But then we go into this one in
Unknown Speaker :this third house which was put together non code air admittance valve you can see it doesn't have event but there is an air admits valve behind the toilet. Once the air hits are met installed, it closes at net air is forced to come out of the toilet. As you can see, it's going to make a pretty big mess. Again, the urban spell was not supposed to be used in this application. This is one of the reasons Again, that airspeed if we could reduce the airspeed dramatically like you can with an any blast or grease type rotating nozzle, you could reduce that airflow down under 30 miles an hour. And that'll take care of about 95 to 99% of your issues, thirst, those couple out there, they're just not going to be able to prevent but if we can get rid of the 95% 98% I think you'd be pretty happy with those.
Unknown Speaker :When you talk about some of those situations you can't get rid of maybe there was a situation where homeowners brother decided to redo a basement didn't follow any code or get any permits and plumbed it all themselves. Could that be maybe a reason that with no vending, that would cause some issues? That's exactly right.
Unknown Speaker :Let's throw a couple more photographs up here. And as you see a couple of photographs, one of the toilet and the other one of a shower stall. These were ones that actually ended up in a court law. The homeowners, brother in law actually came up with And said look, we take and put a public flange on that drain line, and then drain in the middle of the floor in the basement basement. We had to put a ton of that down, we'll build the bathroom around it. That way we don't have to do any cut on the concrete some of like a really cool idea. Well, that's exactly what they did. The city came by cleaned the line and that's the mess you ended up with because they're still found on the system and it was done incorrectly. There was no permits drawn and permits blinker to make sure that they're really to protect the homeowners but they are to do so they don't do this incorrectly had they drawn a permit that are known they needed to vent and then to put the vendor system in it. But once this thing had to go all the way to a court of law a lot of money spent to find out that ever put him out in the system we didn't find event we didn't see it that obviously we went and televise that mind make sure that one event in it but we assumed at that point in time when we saw what happened to that toilet, but that toilet and shower that you just saw. That's typical nonsense or air admittance valve when you see them Blow up that badly. Now, some of them you're gonna see a little water on the floor after you're done, it's gonna look like your youngest boy got up in the middle of the night never turned the light on in the bathroom and missed. And you got a little water to clean up on the floor, not a big deal. It's not a big mess. The homeowner is going to make a song like that, but you're gonna get a little bit of that it's part of the process. Yeah. You know,
Unknown Speaker :now you've kind of gone through what causes this issue and what things you can do to prevent it, you know, there are tools out there you know, I think most manufacturers now are making some sort of an eyeglass type of nozzle now, so you have options out there to look for understanding what you're looking for in a nozzle, you know, you want to reduce that airflow, you want to have a higher degree on on your jets on it to help reduce the airflow and get that in there. And if you have a spinning nozzle and you have that area and you don't have the budget to buy a specific tool that allows will help with that situation. You know, it may not be the best claim nozzle for the situation, but it Get it it'll get you clean to the best you can without blowing up people's toilets. So
Unknown Speaker :again like my two most spending dazzles only have three justices six out the back and they're not particularly good flushing toilets are good cutting tools are good grease tools, but they don't move a lot of material. If you're willing to sacrifice a little time,
Unknown Speaker :that work and work and then the main thing is, you know, you won't have those problems when pulling people's commodes. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker :Well, thank you for this tuning into this episode. You know, we'll have more episodes coming shortly. Don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we hope you guys learned something today.
Unknown Speaker :Appreciate guys opportunity to like talk to us a little bit about where I can get the podcast at other places. The same places I just listed. Oh
Unknown Speaker :good. We Transcribed by https://otter.ai