Sink traps (the U-shaped bend under the sink that serves the dual purpose of preventing sewer smells from coming up the drain and keeping accidentally dropped items from disappearing for good) are immensely useful things, but they can be a huge pain to take apart when necessary for cleaning or recovery purposes. It often requires large pliers or a pipe wrench, and sometimes considerable brute force depending on how shoddy a job was done of installing it in the first place. This task would be made considerably simpler by attaching the trap by means of toggle latches rather than the traditional plumbing nuts. Simply line up the washers on both sides of the trap, and fasten the latches to create a seal and hold the trap in place.
-- ytk, Feb 08 2011

That's fair enough. However, all the modern traps which I've seen use plastic screw-collars (and/or simple push-fits), and are almost as easy to dismantle as what you describe...
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Feb 08 2011


As you say, the difficulty depends on how it was installed. Standard fittings should seal well if given a few turns of thread tape and tightened not much more than hand tight, and they will then be easy to dismantle when needed.

Any increase in complexity, such as implied by toggle latches, is likely to cause more problems than it solves, and may be even more likely to be stuffed up by a ham-fisted plumber.
-- spidermother, Feb 08 2011


//To use a plumbing analogy: it’s not under pressure//

So, this is a plumbing analogy to describe a plumbing situation. Ingenious! It's the linguistic equivalent of a 1:1 map.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Feb 08 2011


At my old middle-school, in the art department, they had great big deep sinks to clean paints, and plaster-of-paris and all sorts of other arty-stuff prior to putting it away. Rather than let all that goop go down and block the drains, the sinks all drained into a kind of secondary super-sink underneath, that managed to collect all the heavy stuff at the bottom, and allowed the water to drain off via a sort of vertically-placed overflow drain half-way up the secondary sink. All the bits of stuff collected in the bottom in murkey mountains of greyish ooze. Any rings, earings, toys, brushes or other stuff that somehow managed to drop drown the sink could easily (if somewhat ickily) retrieved from the undersinks.

So, this is probably not ideal if you use your sink for food preparation or washing up. Fair enough to collect old bits of paint and plaster, probably not so good if it's all oily foodstuffs.
-- zen_tom, Feb 08 2011


I think I recall a U-bend with a built-in port (to use a non-plumbing analogy) at the bottom.
-- baconbrain, Feb 08 2011



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