Our Case StudiesHotel Stack Pipes - Beware of Quick Fixes!

It’s hardly surprising that hotel facilities managers tell us that the sight of ‘waste product’ running though an occupier’s bathroom or worse still, flooding out the hotel kitchen, is one of their worst nightmares!

For hotel operators, problems with blocked stack pipes can be a costly affair in terms of disruption, cost of clean-up, repair and damage to reputation caused by disgruntled customers - and that’s without taking into account the likelihood of lost revenue because part of the building needs to be isolated during clean up.

Preventing such occurrences is of course uppermost in the mind of anyone who has responsibility for building maintenance. However, cheap, quick fix maintenance programmes can often cause more problems than they seek to solve.

Our experience in dealing with emergency drainage problems presented by hotels, restaurants and bars, shows that every property is unique and one approach may not be suitable for all situations. That’s why we will always recommend our customers look for a maintenance programme that is bespoke to their particular building and how it is used.

Defluo was recently called out to attend an emergency situation at a well known hotel in London’s West End. Waste water had been leaking from the 2nd floor bedroom of this 5 storey bedroom hotel. In just over 2 hours the entire bathroom suite and most of the bedroom area was flooded with waste which was being flushed from the floors above.

On arriving the facilities manager explained that only a few days prior, they had had the stack drains cleaned and therefore she was surprised that the problem had occurred. Having lost faith in the company which had serviced the stack pipe she turned to Defluo.

A CCTV survey quickly identified the source of the blockage and the reasons behind it. The problem stemmed from how the stack cleaning had been carried out.

• A residue of 35mm of scale had been left around the inside of the stack – the result of the wrong size ‘cutting tool’ being used to clean the pipe. To do an effective job, the cutting tool must be an exact fit with the stack pipe to ensure that all the scale is removed.
• The stack had been cleaned from the top down which meant that debris had fallen into the stack pipe below (see diagram) so as ‘rodding’ of the stack pipe continued debris was forced down the pipe creating its own blockage.

We set about rectifying the problem by following a proper rodding procure, using a boring tool of the correct diameter. The procedure involved rodding first from the base of the stack pipe (i.e. in the basement of the building) and following the cleaning procedure at various points along its length, working floor by floor and from the bottom up.

In all, the job took a full weekend to resolve, probably twice as long as if it had been done properly in the first place! Not only did the customer end up paying twice for the job but they had been massively inconvenienced.

Going forward the customer agreed to our recommendation and signed up for the ‘Defluo Gold Standard’ preventative maintenance package – which includes an annual stack cleaning regime together with a six monthly float line maintenance.