need a plumbing solution

[Nightshade]

Ok guys and girls, I realise I'm way, way off topic here, but I need an ingenious plumbing bodge and thought of you.
If your collective minds car repair fuel flaps with peg springs, this should be a doddle.

The heating, along with new combi boiler was installed by the brother in law last spring and hasn't had much use till now. The job was less than smooth and I don't feel I'm in a position to ask him back, hence the bodge.

So, the outlet for the boiler hasn't been plumbed in. It condenses and dribbles it'd water through the outlet pipe and into a piece of PVC pipe that is stuck through a hole in the wall. Ideally it should feed into a drain.
Now this wouldn't be much of a problem except his apprentice drilled the hole through our thick cottage wall (3 stories up by the way) on an upwards slope.

The result is that the outlet pipe is pointing uphill and the waste water runs out the end then back along the under side of the pipe, soaking the brickwork below.

Really I need someone with a massive ladder to properly route the pipe but two plumbers have already turned it down as being too high and, as ever, I'm completely skint.

My idea was to put a bend in the pvc pipe, so that the end was the lowest point and the water would temporarily drip harmlessly into the garden without soaking the masonry. But the wall is so thick that any bend is straightened out by the time the pipe is pushed back through.

Any ideas how else to stop it running back?
Happy to draw a picture if that helps, its difficult to explain!

[Doggy]

Is there no possibility of joining the condensate drain into an internal waste, (sink/basin/bath waste pipe)?

[lozz]

The outside pipe dosent need to go into a drain iirc
if its going down the brickwork,id guess the pipehasnt been made long enough,

ive seen a few combi's that have had that pipe routed into indoor waste, tie'd in with sink waste /washing machine waste'

[jasper5]

Take a look here.....http://www.worcester-bosch.co.uk/instal ... -installed

[Nightshade]

Thanks Jasper.

I appreciate how it should be done correctly,though there is no suitable internal drain as it's in a back bedroom. There is, however a trough section of the downpipe from the gutter just a few feet away from the outlet. Trouble is it's 3 stories up and I don't have either a long enough ladder or the cash for someone to route it properly into the gutter downpipe - One plumber mentioned scaffolding - Yikes!!!
I guess 3 stories high is a long way up.

Anyway, I got busy in paint:




See how the problem is just the angle of the pipe? If it ran downhill, the water would just drip from the end of the pipe, hence my thought on putting a bend in to make the end the lowest point.
What I need as an interim solution is a way to let the water fall away from the house.....
As the pvc pipe is just pushed through the wall, I can pull it out and play with it

[dummysock]

Hi

Pull the plastic pipe back into the room. Redrill the hole in the wall at the correct angle. Reinsert drain pipe and connect to boiler

[steve_earwig]

I was thinking maybe bend the pipe using heat, then stuff something through it so it forces it straight, push it through the wall, remove whatever you made it straight with...

However Dummysock is right, it's the only way to do it that'll work and it isn't a bodge either. This is where you say you don't have a drill long enough...

[Nightshade]

I was thinking maybe bend the pipe using heat, then stuff something through it so it forces it straight, push it through the wall, remove whatever you made it straight with...

However Dummysock is right, it's the only way to do it that'll work and it isn't a bodge either. This is where you say you don't have a drill long enough...

Haha! Yup, walls are almost 2ft thick in this old house - no cavity either it's solid Yorkshire stone.
I've organised a serious drill bit though, so we'll give it a go. I suspect it might need lagging too to prevent it freezing.

[GingerMagic]

I agree, you should pull the old pipe out, fill that hole then do another alongside facing downhill, only needs to be a slight slope. Hardly any water comes out anyway.

You can hire big drills and long drill bits from places like Travis Perkins or similar, at a reasonable weekend rate.

As a thought, when you drill the new hole, can you get a 3 storey length with an elbow on the end and feed that in from the outside, minimising water damage to the stone...

[Welly]

An epic bodge maybe would be to feed a length of clear plastic tubing inside your condense drain, the white plastic drain will be 20mm dia so use something like 8 or 10mm OD clear tube and have it poking out by an additional 100mm or so outside. The theory behind this would be that the water 'clings' to the clear tubing and drips off the end away from the wall surface.

Be worth a try and it shouldn't cause and problem with the function of the drain. It's a bodge but it's cheap and worth a go.

My condense had been run to the Kitchen sink waste using a tee piece and a rubber bush to 'accept' the copper* tube.

*not supposed to be copper but installed by a Heating Contractor (new Build) 11 years ago and no trouble with it (it's supposed to rot away).

[Nightshade]

Not sure I'm following Welly.

Would I need to stretch one end of the clear pipe to form a seal against the 20mm pipe?

I had thought about something as simple as an elastic band on the end of the pipe. This would create a step for the returning water to climb over, though I'm not sure of the physics behind that - would it just run up over the band and down the other side, carrying on as it is now? Or would the step created by the band cause this to be the point of the drip?

[steve_earwig]

I think the idea is the water runs down the tube, rather than down the outside of the drain and back towards your house.

They do something similar here with chains, the idea is water runs down the chains rather than splashing on the ground.

I guess you could use string, but then you'd have to put a weight on the end. Oh, and replace it every year when it rots away.

[Welly]

Yes my idea was to break the surface tension of the water to stop it running back against the wall, anything running inside the drain would 'pick up' the water and make it take a different route - in this case further away so it drips off the end away from the wall.

[Doggy]

Plumb it or pump it to an internal foul drain, that way you'll only do the job once.
(You'll almost certainly wind up having to do it in the end anyway).