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How do you calculate kitchen drain height minimums?

14 years ago

When installing counters and kitchen sinks, anybody have a rough guide to figuring out whether the drain will be low enough for various sink depths when adding a garbage disposer?

I have 36" exactly to the counter surface and the wall's drain opening center is a bit high at 22" above the floor. Will that work with 8 or an 8 1/4" depth sinks + GD? Looks really close, anyway. Thanks.

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Comments (5)

homebound
Original Author
14 years ago
Actually, it looks worse than "really close". I might not even be able to use a 7" depth + GD. Not sure, though.
brickeyee
14 years ago
There is no rough guide, except maybe to put the drain arm as low as possible.

Stick a 12 inch deep sink and a large GD on it and you need a pretty low arm.

Use a 6 inch sink and a ting GD and you might get away with only a foot below the counter.

You can easily cope with an arm lower than optimal.

An arm higher than needed often requires opening the wall (sometimes after removing the cabinet or it back) to move the arm lower.
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randy427
14 years ago
The drain line into the wall cannot be higher than the waste line from the disposal. Otherwise you would have standing water in your disposal. More vertical separation is better.
On mine, this means a minimum of 8 vertical inches from the bottom of the sink to the bottom of the drain line.
homebound
Original Author
14 years ago
Thanks for the comments. Accounting for the trap connection, I had eye-balled it at needing 10" from sink bottom to drain center - but if you managed an 8" difference, that's great and I could probably do it. Thanks again.
homebound
Original Author
14 years ago
Here's the update:

Counter height ending up at 36 1/4"
(Drain center was 22" up from the floor)
Insinkerator (Badger 5)
Moen 6 1/4" deep drop-in sink (I found one that was boxy and not too rounded near the sides, so it didn't "look" shallow.)

I ended up with exactly 1" to spare on the vertical part of the disposer drain elbow, so a 7" deep sink might have worked, but it would have been really close.

Cheers.

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