Builders Merchants Journal – BMJ Publishing to Builders Merchants and the UK merchanting industry for more than 95 years
A futuristic-looking, single-storey, three-bedroom floating eco property built on a once-abandoned inlet on the River Severn in Worcestershire is using a series of pumps and the award-winning Sanifos 110 lifting station. Built during Covid lockdowns, the home has no fixed foundations, instead attaching to piles in the bank, and rises and falls with the level of the river.
The Sanifos activates automatically when full, pumping the wastewater up vertically 7.5m to a main drain when the house is at its lowest point on the water. It must also be sufficiently versatile to pump at varying heights as the floating house moves up and down. Receiving wastewater from the bathroom pumps and gravity-fed kitchen water, the unit, which has 110 litres capacity, quietly and efficiently moves the waste on demand.
Due to some initial unresolved snags, the property owners contacted Saniflo, who partnered with a specialist Saniflo distributor and commercial plumbing company, PumpMaster to conduct a site visit and provide a short-term fix until a thorough analysis could reveal that installation errors prevented waste from entering the units and the solution was to remove the admittance valves.
On the Sanifos, the vent port was blanked off completely. As vents are essential for the correct operation of a pump – displaced air must be pushed out when the pump is filling with water – the lack of vent forced air back in via the inlet pipe. Inversely, when the pump activates, and the water level falls, it needs to draw air not to generate a vacuum. The vent port in the tank was opened to fix the immediate issue, and an installer from PumpMaster returned later to install a vent pipe and cage.
