Hi. I’m Bob Schmidt with Home Remodel Workshop. What could I possibly have in this small box that costs less than $10 that you can put on with a screwdriver in less than five minutes that can save you tens of thousands of dollars and a lot of grief. I’ll show you. Let’s get to work.
What we have here is called a flood guard. And what it’s for is you insert it into a drain and backpressure comes up this drain, it pushes this float up sealing off that stopper and prevents sewer from coming up into your basement. On a typical floor drain if there are concrete coming up to here, the way that this is installed is you simply pop your cover off and you can see the inside diameter of the pipe. Now I’ve pre-tightened these just a little bit so that as to compress this ring and make this swell out. I drop it down into the pipe to where I can feel that it’s a pretty snug fit making sure that I keep it low enough that if this comes up. This will not hit the bottom of the floor drain cover. I drop it into the pipe. Take my screwdriver. And basically, about the same way you would tighten nuts on a car tire opposite each other. Don’t drop these things, you don’t want it going down into the pipe.
I alternate it from side to side and I go ahead and I tighten this thing down in the hole. Once you have it down in here with all these screws nice and tight and it’s nice and snug and this is free and clear with nothing in the way that’s going to stop it from going up and down, you’re good to go. Now, we’re going to go ahead and run some water in the backside of this pipe. As you can see, it hits the float, it starts to back up out of the pipe and then finally the float cedes itself so that it stops that water from coming back into your house.
As you can see, with a simple press down of my finger, I can release that stopper. You can imagine if this was waste water with excrement and every other fowl thing that you can think of in it. You don’t want this in your basement. I realized that this device is a quick fix and it will only cover that one drain that you have. And this doesn’t come maintenance free. Every year, you have to get in there before the rainy season and make sure you clean this thing off, put a little bit of oil on the float and make sure it’s operating properly. I realized that there are some trap type systems, some ball type systems that you can put inside your plumbing lines. They’re notorious for felling. If you have a more serious problem than this to take care, I strongly advise that you go to Peterson Valve Company. It’s on the internet. Check it out. They have a unique solution which I think is fantastic.
I’m Bob Schmidt with Home Remodel Workshop. If you like this tip, please subscribe. If not, check out some of our other videos. We got many at the back of our home channel.
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