Gravel Around Plumbing Drain Pipe

As you can see, I'm starting to backfill the pipe. And it's really important that plumbing pipes have got good support underneath them

because you never want a pipe to act as a beam. In other words, you don't want there to be a hollow spot underneath the pipe

so that when weight above pushes on it, it can crack or deflect the pipe

So it's really important that as you backfill, you go a little slowly and you use your fingers and hands

and tuck the material underneath the pipe. Watch how I do it

Okay, so I threw some of the material in here, and I'm just taking it and going back here

and I'm just you can see I'm forcing it underneath the pipe right here making

sure it's nice and solid and sometimes it works better to use finer grain

material like a sand or a pea gravel but this is the material we took out it's

gonna work okay I'm carefully filling around this pea trap I'm just throwing

some in here making sure it's nice and solid under the pea trap now here's

Here's what's really important, just so you know. Right here this is the 2 or 1 styrofoam insulation that keeps the heat from the radiant floor pipes from going down into the

soil so I only want to bring the backfill up as high as the bottom of

this insulation I don't want to bring it all the way up to here because what I'm

going to do is once it's backfilled then I'm going to get some spray foam and

and foam in all the spots before we pour the concrete. You can see it's really easy to backfill around plumbing pipes

Just use common sense. Just don't step on them. Make sure it's solid underneath the pipes

Always use nice granular fill along the sides of the pipes. Don't put big rocks and big chunks of concrete in

Use common sense because sometimes you can have movement in that pipe over time, you know

thermal expansion contraction and if there's a really jagged, rugged rock, it might scratch

a hole and cause a leak. Really just kind of best plumbing practices

Do that and you're going to be in good shape. I'm Tim Carter for AskTheBuilder.com

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