Plumbing The Pinery

Certainly! Indoor plumbing became available in the 1870s, but it was not found everywhere. Instead, you might have found plumbing in the upscale urban homes of your contemporaries or in public buildings. But as the technology improved and the infrastructure expanded, plumbing became a part of more and more homes, even in rural areas.

In The Pinery, the typical plumbing service call is for clogged drains. This remains a widespread problem among homeowners, who experience it due to the myriad of debris that they send down their pipes. Most of us have some sort of drainage problem at one point or another.

In The Pinery, plumbing encompasses the installation, repair, and routine maintenance of all types of systems used for <a class="wpil_keyword_link" href="https://bestdenverplumbing.com/how-to-shut-off-your-water-supply-in-urgent-situations/" title="water supply" data-wpil-keyword-link="linked" data-wpil-monitor-id="11435">water supply</a> and drainage in both homes and businesses. This could mean anything from a simple task like stopping a leak or unclogging a drain to something as complex as ensuring that an entire plumbing system—from the water supply line to the clean-out groove—complies with local codes and regulations.

Plumbers work with the systems that carry water, waste, and storm drainage in our buildings. They work in houses, factories, and offices. And they mostly work underground or in walls, out of sight and often out of mind. But when there's a problem—particularly a problem with the pipe carrying water to the house (that's the "supply" line) or the pipe carrying waste to the outside (that's the "drain")—it's the plumber who gets the call. When plumbing goes wrong, as it did in the house on the corner where I used to live, it can be a disaster.

The 1880s saw a distinctly different bathroom experience when compared to the current day. The average home featured no plumbing, a fact that sharply limited access to the luxury of indoor bathing. Most people used an outdoor privy instead of a toilet and a hand-pumped tub or large, metal wash basin inside, next to an unlit bathroom. The wooden walls of an outhouse and the wooden enclosures of a makeshift bath in a shed or basement were not much different from the luxury of a wooden tub, cast iron sink, and a rusty, back-to-back, washbasin toilet found in a city tenement, where life was as basic and near-impoverished as it could get. Structurally, bathrooms were quite boring; the real action in the 1880s was in the kitchen.

America saw the beginnings of its plumbing advancements in the indoor arrangements of the bathroom and kitchen. Beginning in the early to mid-19th century and becoming widespread through the late 1800s to the early 1900s, indoor bathroom plumbing found its way into many American homes—albeit not always connected to a sewage system, as that part of the infrastructure was still being worked out. By the 1950s, however, it was standard for homes in America to be plumbed both for water and sewage, with most bathrooms containing some version of the modern flush toilet.

Flush toilets, as we know them today, were not commonly found in homes and public places in the world before the 19th century. The first version of a toilet with an actual "flush" can be traced back to Great Britain in the late 16th century. Sir John Harington, a godson of Queen Elizabeth I, is credited with that invention. Still, it can hardly be called a true flush toilet because it used a close tank and a lot of water that ran downhill to do the "flushing." The 18th century saw more toilet designs incorporating flushing, but reliably plumbing that water to the toilet was a plumbing issue not resolved until the English plumber Cummings figured out how to use a trap to keep sewer gas out of the building and incorporated it into the plumbing.

During the 19th century, the average person partook in infrequent bathing rituals relative to contemporary standards. The individuals who could access clean water and had plumbing in their homes still limited themselves to what we would now consider a "sponge bath." Even the middle class might have only enjoyed a full soak once a week, if that, with the privation of the public bathhouse for those who really wanted one.

During the 1800s, if you wanted to drain a bathtub, your best option was to do it by hand, as plumbing in homes was not yet anywhere near what we have today. Many homes had portables that would have to be emptied as soon as the occupant was done with the bath. After the bath, the water would be removed by either a bucket or a rudimentary faucet. If you were lucky, your household plumbing would hook up to a system that drained into a moat. If you were like most people, your moat wasn't working that well, and you were draining right onto your property—wherever that was—after your bath.

In the late 19th century, people employed a range of materials for personal hygiene after using the bathroom. These included pages torn from catalogs and newspapers, ears of corn, and other natural materials. Although some commercial toilet paper had begun to appear in the United States, what was available in the average home was little different from what members of the Latin Church had used centuries earlier.