Specifying shower and wetroom drainage in hotel, gym and leisure facilities requires consideration of several factors; hygiene, hydraulic reliability and installation constraints. Erik Mul, Product Manager at ACO Building Drainage, breaks down why good specification must balance maintenance, flow performance and installation flexibility.
Specifiers often run into recurring obstacles when planning shower and wetroom drainage for high-footfall leisure facilities. Common consequences can be odours, slow drainage, damage to finishes from standing water, inaccessible fixtures, and costly remedial work.
Pressure fluctuations can impact wetrooms when several outlets operate simultaneously, while undersized channels or poorly optimised trap layouts increase the risk of siphonage, and seal loss. Low floor build-up and difficult pipe routes in refurbishments restrict where traps or standard gradients can be used.
For successful projects, specifiers must address three overlapping concerns:
Gullies and traps need to be accessible – without specialist tools – for routine cleaning. The shape and layouts of the final installation should minimise debris build up, so removable traps and grates are an advantage. Similarly, surfaces that can be disinfected easily make maintaining a high standard of hygiene far more achievable.
To help prevent siphonage, specify channel and gully systems with proven discharge performance. In communal facilities, continuous channel runs can help manage larger water volumes, and optimised trap positioning and channel capacity reduce standing water as well as the risk of seal loss during peak flow conditions.
- Installation adaptability
Where floor build-up is limited or pipework access is constrained, low-profile solutions and adaptable outlet orientations help prevent compromises to trap depth or falls. Rotating or horizontal gullies, modular channels and height-adjustable products let installers align drainage to the current substrate and membrane without bespoke onsite fabrication.
ACO Building Drainage has developed new solutions in its latest ShowerDrain range to address the challenges of drainage specification in hotel, gym, and leisure facility showers and wetrooms. The new range was designed and tested specifically to tackle the challenges that specifiers come up against, including serviceability, hydraulic capacity and adaptability. These include the Modular 125 system for continuous runs in communal showers or poolside changing areas.
Specifiers can accommodate complex or irregular layouts by using ACO’s custom channel and gully arrangements.
Low-build height solutions in the range are designed for constrained floor heights, and hydro-formed gullies in ShowerDrain C enable higher flows and easier cleaning. ShowerDrain E is compatible with flexible floors and features a horizontal gully body capable of 360° rotation for tight or irregular spaces. ShowerDrain B offers a channel system with a rotatable gully solution for tiled floor installations.
The Passino gully, incorporates a two-piece removable foul-air trap and has an updated design to optimise the flow rate. The Passino gully fits directly into a DN100 outlet pipe for faster installation.
The ACO range gives specifiers and installers more options to suit their application, and avoid common trade-offs in aesthetics, hygiene and flow performance, which – in hotels and leisure facilities – can make all the difference.
For more on ACO’s new ShowerDrain range, see ACO.co.uk.
