I have a 2-story brick colonial house, built in 1941. Discovered leaky 2nd-floor shower this weekend when water started dripping in the living room. Most likely scenario: lead shower pan has disintegrated around the shower drain. The big problem, the plumber says, is the drain pipe from the shower to the stack is lead: trying to build a new shower, and trying to attach a new drain to the old drain pipe is a kludge at best and will likely fail and generally shouldn’t be done.
Of course, this means putting in new drain pipe, which means ripping up more of the bathroom floor, and ripping out old pipes which were imbedded in concrete, and perhaps reinforcing the floor joists to accomodate new pipe–basically enough destruction so that one might as well re-model and re-plumb the whole bathroom.
So far as I can tell, this would cost at least 10 times as much as having a new shower pan installed, but how risky would it be to put a new drain on old pipe?
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Connecting new to old is not a problem as long as the old is still good.
Suggestion ---- I would take out the old pan & subfloor exposing the plumbing, a lot of the old lead pipe & fittings usually connect to a galvanized or cast iron pipe. Cut that pipe & connect new no-hub or plastic dwv P trap then new sub floor , pan, etc......
My next door neighbor has 1941 plumbing I replaced his lead bend for the toilet but left everything else in place. When I did his remodel.
I wonder what abs & pvc are going to look like after 64 years of abuse?