Floods ahoy when emptying the kitchen sink.

Went chasing the leak, dismantled the helter skelter of pipes, cleaned them of the ‘looks like fresh poo’ gunk. Reassembled the helter skelter. Turns out, it was the sink waste bolt (that clamps the cup underneath the sink exit up to the waste grill that sits on top of the sink exit) that had broken, rusted through, so it was hanging free, hence the flooding when more than a trickle is drained.

Bought a new sink waste that looked like the old one. The main out pipe was a standard 40mm, but discovered the old overflow pipe was not standard, so had to replace the whole overflow attachment, which was lucky because it rust-snapped too during the dismantling. New waste installed, solid, nicely done, hanging 3cm higher than the old one, so no longer lined up with the 2nd sink waste.

Went back to the Screwfix store, same nice young man, pity and an earnest desire to help shining in his eyes. Explained my situation, explained why I needed this thingy, probably, showed a photo of the original helter skelter. His brow furrowed. This was way out of his area of expertise, but clearly knew way more that I did. “It’s always a problem when you go chasing a plumbing fix”. As soon as he said that, I realised the scope of my challenge had increased to encompass redoing the whole helter skelter.

Long story short, was actually easy enough to do with a ‘helter skelter’ kit for twin sinks. Spent less time on that than on redoing the single waste, and way less time than dismantling, cleaning, and remantling.

Of course now I have the two sink waste outputs at different levels, and will be a faff to replace the remaining old one, but I think I get the knack now, so hopefully only a small faff.

NB: “helter skelter” is my analogy for the rat’s nest of plumbing under a twin sink unit. As far as I know, this is not an official plumbing term. Perhaps should have used the phrase, “rat’s nest”…

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