Perhaps this affords as good an opportunity as any of drawing attention to the highly artistic rain-water heads that have lately been introduced by Thomas Elsley, of 32 Great Portland Street, W. These are made to suit every style of architecture and every variety of roof and guttering, and practically without limit as to size. Their quality is beyond praise.
It is essential to bear in mind that rain-water is liable to exert considerable solvent action on lead, consequently pipes and cisterns of this metal must be avoided. The pipes may be of iron, or of specially lead-encased block-tin, and the cisterns of “galvanised” iron or slate.
As Eassie has pointed out, there is much to be considered in the arrangement of rain-water pipes from a sanitary point of view, where a separator and storage tank are not in use, because the foul air delivered from them is sucked into the rooms near the roof, on which the sun’s heat pours. A fire lighted in a room develops the same danger when the rain-water pipe terminates near the windows of the room. Another danger accruing from rain-water pipes which connect directly with the drain is due to the fact that the joints of the iron rain-water pipes are seldom air-tight, and foul air is therefore often driven or sucked into the rooms when the windows are open. It is easy to imagine how dangerous this must be in houses which have been fitted up with iron (or even lead) rain-water pipes running down the interior walls, and having their terminations close to a dormer window, skylight, or staircase ventilator on the roof, with the foot of the rain-water pipe taken direct into a drain leading to a town sewer. But the risk is greatly increased when the rain-water pipes are connected with a closed cesspool, to which the rain-water pipe is acting as a ventilator.
When rain-water pipes deliver into the drain directly, they are often made to act as soil pipes from the closets, in which case the evil is intensified. The soil from the closets is apt to adhere to the interior of the pipe, generally on the side opposite to that traversed by the rain-water, and the poisonous smell escapes at any bad joints and always at the roof orifice.
When the rain-water pipe is of cast iron, other sources of danger are present if the pipe is used also for conveying soil from a closet. Unless the rim of the soil pipe from the closet is joined to the rain-water pipe by a proper cast-iron socketed joint, the connection must be made by means of a piece of lead pipe which receives the soil pipe, and the joint between the lead soil pipe and the upper and lower parts of the cast-iron pipe cannot be properly soldered. Here sometimes grievous calamity follows cases where the combined pipe is ventilating the drain and sewer; the pipe joints are frequently open, and when the windows are unclosed for ventilation the foul air is whisked into the house. Eassie insists that it is cheaper to owner and dweller alike to have a separate soil-pipe erected at first.
5. Outlet of Rain-water Pipes.
All rain-water pipes should deliver into the open air, and have no connection with the drains, except when they are disconnected. They should discharge their contents over a gully grating as at a, Fig. 5, or underneath the grating as at b, the ends of the pipes in both cases being in the open air. Every householder should insist upon this being carried out. But occasionally the rain-water pipes descend inside the house and there is no open yard where a disconnecting gully can be fixed. In such a case a separate drain should be laid to the nearest area or yard, and separation ensured. In laying down new drains in a house, where the rain-water pipes must descend in the interior, it will be better to provide a separate or twin drain to the nearest open-air space.
Provision must be made at the roof for keeping foreign matters out of the rain-water pipes. Leaves, soot, and dirt will accumulate round the pipe orifices, and very often will cause the gutter to be flooded during a storm. The usual way to avert this is to fix over the opening of the pipe in the bottom of the gutter a galvanised open wire half-globe, or a raised cap of thick lead pierced with tolerably large holes. The cost for this is trifling, but the value is great. Whenever rain-water pipes must run down the inside wall of a house, lead should be adopted. Sometimes rain-water pipes are taken down in the interior, when a very little initial study could have brought them to the exterior face of a wall—where alone they should be taken, whenever it is possible to do so.
On attic roofs, and where only one side of the house can be used for the attachment of rain-water pipes, the water from one side is brought across the roof by means of a “box” gutter of wood, lined at the bottom and sides with lead or zinc, and covered with a board. This often emits a very foul smell, owing to the accumulation of decaying matter. When such guttering cannot be avoided, it should occasionally—say once a week—be carefully cleaned out. The same matters will sometimes silt up and stop the gullies, shown at the foot of the rain-water pipes (Fig. 5), hence it is equally necessary to see that these traps are cleaned out, say monthly.