Daily Home Renovation Tips

In Part 14, the new concrete floor for the en suite which was installed during last year’s home renovation / makeover project had been poured and the ‘oversized’ hole for the floor drain had been created. Why?

Well, Bennett is using a different type of floor drain, anti-leak product form Schluter Systems called the Schluter-Kerdi-Drain.

I had never heard of it before. Bennett has used it to install more than 40 showers to date an swears by it. He has never had a single leak in any of those previous showers where he has used this system.

This is not simply a different type of drain. It is a complete water drainage shower flooring system. Quickly, let’s take this one component at a time.

There is no black rubberized leak barrier. Instead it is a Kerdi-Kereck orange fibre water-proofing membrane with specialized corners (shown below before installation).

In the next articles we’ll show how these were applied in our shower.

The drain is not a simple black pipe. Above is a picture of the drain component up-side down. Notice it is a single piece of both drain pipe and ‘fleece (on the other side) laminated integrated bonding flange’ (that’s the technical term that I copied from the packaging (what? you think I could have made that up? ).

There is also a lateral adjustment ring and a height adjustment collar together with the square stainless steel / anodized aluminum grate (all per the above picture).

The manufactures web site is a terrific source of information on the different components and this product. As well, the packaging for the product includes both a DVD and very well put together pamphlet with numerous pictures on how to install this product.

Next time, Bennett starts to install the orange water proofing membrane on top of the poured concrete floor.

To continue with the next article in this series, simply select this link to Part 16.