S-Traps for Plumbing Dummies

Yellow line follows the S-trap

Every day our staffers run across bogus posts pounded out by self-appointed "professional journalists" at content farms. That raises the question, "If you get paid for claiming to be a professional journalist, does that make you one?" Whatever the case, the output of our DotD nominees never ceases to amaze us for its downright bogosity. Take today's DotD, Regina Paul – take her, please! – and the rubbish she published at Hunker.com, "How to Install a Toilet S-Trap."¹

Right from the get-go Paul shows that her familiarity with plumbing is pretty much limited to making snarky remarks about plumbers' cracks. No one who's ever plumbed a sink would start off by trying to tell readers that,

"An s-trap toilet is one in which the outlet for waste passes through a pipe in the floor rather than a pipe in the wall which is called p-trap. These days p-trap toilets have become much more common, but there are still some older houses and even commercial buildings with s-trap toilets. "

Paul did a masterful job of confusing both herself and her readers. To unpack Regina's misconceptions, almost any modern residential toilet has an S-trap built into it (see the image above). Yes, you can buy a toilet with a P-trap if you live in certain parts of the world, but in general, all the plumber does is set the toilet on a flange that dumps the waste directly into the soil stack (pun intended). In other words, Paul is full of hooey.

She's so full of hooey that she spent another 413 words and ten steps telling her readers that,

"...if you own an older home or business building, it can be important to know how to install an s-trap toilet, especially if you don't want to do some serious remodeling by adding a waste outlet pipe in the wall..."

...and then explaining (sort of) how to install a toilet. Yep, folks, Regina is even stupider than the OQ: she never mentioned that there is such a thing as an S-trap in plumbing, but they're prohibited by plumbing codes in most of the civilized world. That's because draining water through an S-trap creates suction that can leave the trap "dry," which allows sewer gas to enter the house. That's a bad thing.

Nope, Paul didn't understand the question, and didn't understand her answer, either. She did, however, manage to invent a new fastener, the "john bolt." In case you wondered, plumbers and hardware stores call those flange bolts. John Bolt was an actor... Whatever the case, Paul's reward for her creativity is exactly what she deserves: she's our Dumbass of the Day.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_4740748_install-toilet-strap.html

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