My brother and his MIL both have a vertical pipe, about 2.5 in across, sticking out of their garage concrete floor. They stand about 2.5 ft high, and my brother’s seems to be filled with dirt. Both are at the corner of where the washer is placed, given the water hookups.
What is that? Even my engineer/house-handyman dad couldn’t come up with a theory.
Marker for buried drain clean out port?
My grandmother had one in the basement… I think it was so that during a storm, water wouldn’t flood up out of the sewer.
Are their houses in low lying areas?
The typical washing machine drain used throughout the USA looks like that. You do NOT directly connect the output of the washer to the plumbing system.
Instead, the builder provides a 2.5" pipe about 3’ tall that is open at the top, has a trap buried in the floor, and is then connected to the wastewater plumbing. It’s called a standpipe.
The washer has a drain connector on the back to which you hook a 1 to 1-1/4" diameter fairly rigid rubber hose and tuck the end of the hose into the standpipe. They make hoses with a J-bend on the end for just that purpose.
In houses where the hookup is inside the house, the drain arrangement is the same, except the standpipe is usually buried in a wall and the opening is trimmed with a plastic cover of some sort. If you pull out the cover & look in there you’ll see the standpipe.
As to why your brother’s pipe is full of dirt, I can only guess that it hasn’t been used in years and the trap dried out and it began to stink, so somebody stuffed a rag (or something similar) in there to cork it off, then added dirt to “finish” the job. Crude, stupid even, but a lot of homeowners would consider that a viable fix.
If your bro wants to install a washer there, he’s going to need to clear that pipe, and the less material that gets flushed down the bottom vice pulled out the top, the better off he’s going to be overall.
Everywhere I have ever lived, the washing machine drains into the same system as everything else (sinks, toilets, etc). Some places may have a seperate system for ‘grey’ water, but I think it’s pretty rare.
Indeed, in my community we get charged for wastewater treatment for every gallon of water that comes out of our tap (even if it’s the outside sprinklers, or washing the car, or filling the swimming pool), so I have no problem just running my washer into the house plumbing.
I think that LSLGuy meant that the washer drain should not have a sealed connection at the drain standpipe. The hose slips inside the pipe; there needs to be an opening to atmosphere so that the pipe doesn’t siphon water out of the washer (or out of the drain line in the event of a blockage.)
Many homes had grey water dain systems that are no longer in use. I would guess the pipe to be the remnant of that system and not the main sewer. Garages also had a sloped floor leading to a drain that ended just outside the garage.
It’s not that it drains into some other system. It means that there is not a closed connection between the washer and the drain, as you have with sinks. The washer drain tube just pokes into the open end of the pipe, instead of being screwed together. I don’t know why this is, but it may be to avoid backup into the washer if the drain backs up.
Washers are good at plugging waste pipes, and a sealed connection could send the water into sinks or up the vent pipes. I remember a house with a messed up system that did have some waste water shoot out the vent on the roof. It wasn’t the washer, and it was realy funny. Someone was unplugging a stopage and forced the water backwards at a good speed and pressure.
Is the Water heater Gas? if it is in the garage space it could be there to prevent a car from backing into it. In most houses I have seen these they are filled with Cement not dirt.
That’s where the CIA pumps in the Brain Gas.
It could be where an underground oil tank has been abandoned-in-place after a furnace conversion from oil to gas.
Almost every house in Seattle older than 25 years has one somewhere. Ours is in the driveway.
Rather than go the the expense of digging the tank out, it was filled with a concrete slurry, then plugged. They leave an access pipe. (I’m not sure why) The tank isn’t supposed to be under a structure, but a lot of them are.
I have seen many houses with a tall filled post between the laundry hookups and the area where the car goes. I think it’s just Laundry Protection.
Most places this is true. There are very few on-lot greywater recycling facilities for individual homes. Grey water recycling is virtually unknown in the US.
One way this may be misinterpreted, however, is in the case of a separate sewer system, where sanitary waste is transported to a treatment plant and a separate stormwater drainage system takes stormwater runoff off site to a nearby stream. A True grey water system is much different. Under no circumstances should washer drains or any other household fixtures be connected to a separated stormwater pipe.
Man, I should get some of these pipes then. I could use some Brain Gas.