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Building a chocolate shop: concrete
When we started looking for a work space to lease, having adequate drainage for cleaning was on our feature shopping list. Almost none of the spaces we looked at had floor drains, and those that did had them in inconvenient places, usually under a water heater or next to a toilet. To make our current space usable, we would need to put in floor sinks1 for our three-compartment wash sink and produce sinks, drains for condensate water from our coolers, drains for two hand sinks and a mop sink. We also need convenient access to drains so we could wash down larger equipment without flooding ourselves or our neighbors. As we started laying out where the drains would have to go, it became obvious that we would have to chop up a lot of floor to put in the drains.
After a bit of head-scratching, we figured out we could connect the drain dots, and put in a single continuous drain instead of multiple smaller ones, with pretty much the same cost of excavation and new concrete. (The minimum amount of concrete we had to order was much larger than we would need to fill in new floor around any drains.) We found a segmented2 polyethylene drain made by NDS that would work.
We ordered some parts, our contractor chopped up a 45-by-5-foot area of floor, set up the drain in the right place, leveled it, used short segments of rebar to anchor it, and we were ready to pour concrete. For those of you with an interest in way too much construction detail3 , here’s the quickie how-to video for adding concrete to trench drains.
- Floor sinks are small basins, usually white porcelain in this part of the world, mounted in the floor under wash sinks to isolate their outlets from the main drains. [up]
- Each piece has a different graduated slope, so when they’re all connected together, there’s a smooth, continuous flow of water from the high end to the low end. [up]
- Much rolling of eyes from the women in the family. [up]
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