I have undertaken the completion of a pool house that has a 4' by 4' shower area. The shower floor is flat poured concrete with a drain in the middle and no access from below. The drain is made by Sioux Chief and is the 821 series. The drain is even with the concrete surface and is otherwise correctly plumbed into the waste water system. If possible, I want to use a pre-made shower pan like the Tile-Redi, Schluter, or Kerdi products, but I don't know how to adapt a shower pan into the existing 821 PVC drain. The drain body has a metal ring that supports the strainer and has three notches suggesting that maybe a spanner wrench would unthread something to adjust to the thickness of the pan? But since the drain is in concrete, how could it be turned? Any information or guidance would be most welcomed.

Hi Frank:

Does your drain look like my picture.. If it does, seems that in order to install the tile-redi schluter system you would need to breakout the concrete around the drain to just below the shower drain assembly and completely remove the shower drain assembly... no need to go lower.. just to under the shower drain. The part with the bolts needs to be up inside the new pan... so water drains back to drain and WEEP holes in the strainer assembly.

The idea here will be to remove the old shower strainer and use a coupling to attach to pipe and install new shower strainer assembly to the redimade shower system. You just have to get deep enough to get past shower strainer and cut the pipe... I would cut the pipe with an inside cutter blade (see pic.#2... this will keep you from opening hole up real big) just underneath old shower drain and then couple onto it. Cut around the outside of the pipe... then would chip away enough concrete to install a coupling and you should be all set. Then install schluter drain as presented in 3rd pic. Check out their website for more info.

Homepage - Schluter-Systems

That's my take on it anyway.

Hope it helped some... Let me know your thoughts... Mark.


.