One of the most important plumbing pipes in the house doesn't carry water it carries air. I am talking about the plumbing vent line. While it does its work silently, throughout the year, the pipe is particularly vulnerable to dead leaves, dead animals and snow and therefore occasionally becomes blocked in the late fall or winter.
To understand the (job|task|purpose} of the vent line we must first understand how houses drain, and how the drainage system normally prevents sewer gases from refluxing into the house. The piping that goes from the house to the sewer line is alternatively called the drain, waste vent system, or DWV. This outflow line serves as the outflow route of water from sink drains plus waste from toilet. The plumbing vent line, which goes up to the roof, is responsible for maintaining stable air pressure within the waste vent system, and this has important implications for home safety.
When drains are not in use, they are full of air. The sewer the drains connect to are also full of air. But this air, is foul and dangerous and must be prevented, at all costs, from refluxing into the house. The plumbing fixture that prevents this from happening is called the "plumbing trap." Plumbing traps are "P" or "S" shaped segments of the outflow drain. Between drain uses, water collects in the traps' curved bottoms, and this standing water blocks reflux of the odorous sewer gases. A crucial function! When the sink drains, the newly draining water displaces the standing water that was sitting in the curved portion of the trap and takes its place. Thus, there is always water filling that segment of the trap and serving as a block against reflux of sewer gas.
But there is another side to air fluxes in the drain pipes. When water drains out of the sink or tub, it pushes any air in the drain pipe out of the house. This causes a lowering in the air pressure behind the descending tide of water. If nothing were done about this, than the lowered pressure pocket in the drain will suck out the water from the plumbing trap through a siphoning effect. This will empty the trap enough to permit noxious sewer gases to flow backwards through the trap and into the home.
This dangerous event is prevented from occurring by the plumbing vent pipe. The vent pipe leaves the drain in a perpendicular direction, and, through a series of parallel connections, rises to the roof and exits from the home as the protruding vent tube, described above. When air pressure in the drain system is lowered, air is sucked back into the house through the vent pipe, this stabilizes the air pressure in the drains, and prevents the backflow of noxious sewer gases
Sometimes air vents get clogged. They may be clogged by ice, snow, dead animals, leaves.When this happens, the air fails to equalize in the system and the householder will begin to hear a strange gurgling sound in this drains, which actually corresponds to the siphoning taking place as water is pulled out of the traps. When a home owner hears this sound, he must call a plumber to clean out the vent, as the entrance of sewer gas can be dangerous. The plumber will climb onto the roof and clear the debris.
Author Resource:
Thanks to A-1 Plumbing of Baltimore a Baltimore plumbing company for sponsoring this article. The Baltimore plumbers. of A-1 Plumbing of Baltimore, repair and replace and install plumbing air vents
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