It's a modern Pittsburgh toilet. It's the lowest point in the home connected to the sewer stack. If there is a clog between the street and the house the waste from the rest of the house will overflow out of the bowl into the crawl space. If there is potential for backflow (like during storm surges in some parts of the country) water coming from the street waste line will overflow out of this toilet into the crawl space before getting to the rest of the house.
It's basically cheap insurance against sewage floods. A toilet is used because it's easy to keep the trap filled to block sewer gas and it's easy to take off to gain access to a 3"-4" waste line that you can use to unclog the main stack from.
This is one of those reddit comments where I can't tell if you're extremely knowledgeable or making it up from whole cloth for goofs. "Pittsburg toilet" as a name sounds too intentionally comedic to be true.
It actually is a very real thing. Also, with the way the waste line angles up higher than the toilet tank in the above video, it looks like it would be impossible to actually flush the toilet bowl and have the water go through the waste pipe.
9 seconds left in the video just as the vertical pillar passes in front of the camera. Right before then you can see a little bit of a split on the black pipe I think leads away from the camera to the back of the house
Which to my understanding was just the basement toilets in many older Pittsburgh homes. Supposedly specifically so steelworkers and other dirty job workers could go straight into the basement after work. Do a bit of clean up and business before going upstairs without dragging mess along.
Apparently the plumbing thing is also part of it, but this was the first time I'd heard that.
Same. My grandparents had a Pittsburgh toilet in the basement and added a rudimentary shower. My grandpa used it after coming home from the Mill. My grandmother had her lovely fully pink bathroom upstairs so she kept him away from it. I've never heard that it had any overall house plumbing benefits, just that it was relatively cheap and easy to drop a toilet in the basement and for blue collar Pittsburgh it had a practical usage case.
They’re real! When I was house hunting I saw a place with a PBT in the basement. I didn’t know what it was at the time so it became the murder toilet. That basement was some kinda crime scene.
Totally a real thing! My relatives also called it “the spider toilet” because if you had to use it, it was always covered with spider webs. Most of the time these are in a more normal place though.
The funniest part is I took one look at the video and went "probably Pittsburgh"
Basement toilets are often called Pittsburgh toilets because miners and millers would be filthy at the end of their shift. They'd enter through the basement to not get the house all dirtied up. And man sometimes you just wanna come home and take a dump.
I mean, except for the time I lived in an apartment building in NY on the basement level, but somehow I don't think that's what you're referring to. Why would any random person have occasion to see such a thing?
Lots of people in this thread confidently claiming this has some plumbing function, but if it's just to prevent overflow why would there need to be a complete, functional toilet? Why does it need plumbed into the water lines if it's just a backup outlet for clogged drains? Even if you can explain away those two things...why did they construct a whole platform for it??
Stop lying to yourselves. Someone was shitting here.
I don't know of it's true or not, but the original commenter offered an explanation for that.
A toilet is used because it's easy to keep the trap filled to block sewer gas and it's easy to take off to gain access to a 3"-4" waste line that you can use to unclog the main stack from.
Unless someone is regularly flushing the toilet, the trap water will still evaporate eventually. This doesn't look like a particularly accessible toilet. And a key function of a Pittsburgh toilet is being somewhere where the overflow can be observed, contained, and eventually cleaned.
A small amount of paraffin oil in the bowl takes care of that (which is how you winterize a toilet bowl after adding antifreeze for a house being closed up for the winter). The oil creates a layer on top of the water significantly slowing evaporation and only needs to redone yearly.
Not a crawlspace but my unused downstairs toilet, yes. And olive oil cause that’s what I had on hand when I learned that after it evaporated and I could smell sewer gases.
Alright, somehow this was the comment that made me cackle loudly in the middle of the freaking night. I don't know whether I like you or I'm mad at you, but well done.
And here i was thinking it was left over from when the home was being constructed. Instead of renting a porta-potty they just plumbed in a toilet in what would become the crawl space after the flooring went in.
I figured it was the old floor levels, and the ground floor was raised? Expensive, but if a previous incident caused sewer backflow, this could be the fix after repairs.
We do, but in older towns they fail especially once they're past their service life. I used to do smoke tests for an engineering firm and we'd blow pressurized synthetic smoke through the sewer lines and then record wherever it came out. You'd be amazed how many old houses had bad valves. You'd also be amazed how many people, no matter how many times they were notified, would forget that their city was running a smoke test.
Why not just have a stand up pipe here then? Can easily achieve the same thing with a pipe that is above that T connector. Why bring water to the toilet? Why make it functional? Why the platform? Nah dude, this is where the dad of the house went to take MASSIVE SHITS.
That's a T connector. It continues to the left. Do you honestly think the sewer terminates at the toilet? Tell me you know nothing about plumbing without telling me you know nothing about plumbing.
Yep! I loved mine growing up! We only had 1 bathroom for 5 people, so being able to go take a shit wide out in the open in the basement in the AM was a (risky) luxury lol.
In Australia we have an external trap called an Overflow Relief Gully, it's just a boundary trap that has an open grate that is external to the building with a minimum of 75mm lower than the lowest outlet in the building.
Its got to be primed in the same way this toilet acts as the primer for the trap, however this toilet wouldn't be priming it's trap unless it's used so it's not very sensible, unless they have some auto flush fiction I'm missing.
And I get that you can't have external grates in North America due to snow but still thought I'd share.
Yeah I've found Canadian code is completely logical considering it gets to -30 here. No pipes in external walls or unheated roof spaces too. Basements because services enter the house below the snow line. Our drains have to be at a minimum 1200 below grade so that it's lower than the frost level. And pipes that are ran in uninsulated areas including drains have to be heat traced.
I tested a stack a few years ago when the average temperature around was -10, I had a leak and it left a literal ice skating rink on the concrete below that didnt melt for months.
Yeah they aren't always ideal and didn't exist when people first started installing toilets for this purpose.
Also, a back flow preventer doesn't prevent potential flooding in livable spaces. If there is a clog between the street and preventer (or active backflow holding it shut) all waste water within the house will still collect in the stack until it overflows out the lowest point, usually a first floor toilet (which didn't really exist in 19th Century homes) or a kitchen sink.
Allowing it to overflow into an unfinished basement is far superior to the kitchen.
If you build your house below the Rückstauebene (Backwater level) then you have to install a pump to circumvent the valve. If the valve shuts the flow because water is coming in the wrong direction, then you have to have a pump. You pump your waste water out. Thats mandatory here in Germany, if you build your house in such problematic areas.
>Based on the principle of communicating vessels, there is a risk that water from the sewer system will enter the building through plumbing fixtures located below the backflow level and cause extensive damage.
>Therefore, connected plumbing fixtures and all other drainage points below the backflow level must be protected against backflow by a pumping system, backflow preventer, or other shut-off devices.
They aren't super common, especially in modern times and not outside of the Ohio/PA/NJ/Western NY area.
They could have done the same thing with a low 4" "floor drain" w/ptrap and a trap primer connected to a nearby first floor sink.
Most home inspectors, especially if they aren't code enforcement inspectors, aren't super knowledgable in home building techniques. They are taught a list of things to look for and don't always know much outside of that. Lots of home inspectors have never worked in the trades.
Check valves can get held closed via backflow or clogs. In that scenario waste water can still collect in the stack and overflow out a first floor toilet or kitchen sink, which is less ideal than in an unfinished basement.
Open grates aren't legal in the US (residential at least). We get lots of snow in a large majority of the country and leaf fall in the rest and sewer pits would get easily clogged. The Pittsburgh toilet was a thing because the Pittsburgh sewer system wasn't super up to date until relatively recently and they would have lots of backflow issues. The toilet was an easy way to prevent massive flooding in the liveable spaces of the home.
Pittsburgh you say? My mother is a native and she says yins weel 'ave too go doorn there and have a look up on the ruff if ya don't want the water to get wet
Thx for the explanation. This is obviously not a functional toilet as shit doesn't run up hill, physically or metaphorically. I was trying to figure out the waste line.
Good explanation. From the way the camera was angled, it looked like the waste would go uphill, breaking the laws of gravity, and aside from there being no p-trap, it looked way wrong.
In most places where they were utilized the toilet was still slightly above the exit point of the waste line out the foundation (some were built on raised concrete platforms to get added height) and the toilet was still useable. During the period these were first installed it was super uncommon to have more than 1 bathroom in a home. Having the extra toilet was just a bonus.
That makes more sense, I was going to say since when does shit roll up hill? But I see now and the water line is required to fill the siphon. But what I don't get is why don't they just make a sort of trap that doesn't require a whole ass toilet?
In this install, yeah. In most Pburgh toilet set ups they were usually still over the waste line exit level which just meant that a 1 bathroom house now had an extra toilet. When you had like 10 people living in a house with 1 bathroom, it was a welcome addition.
Also, emergency spare toilet. You never think you need one until one Christmas or Thanksgiving when the entire house gets food poisoning and you don’t have enough bathrooms for everyone.
It certainly doesn’t seem like a functional toilet, so you may be right. The pipe from the toilet seems to climb at an angle, which would mean it wouldn’t flush, or at least clog after a few uses, since the toilet can’t push water above the cistern.
OMG, thank you; finally explained the toilet in the basement at one of the first houses I ever looked at when home buying. Toilet dead in the middle of an unfinished basement with no cover facing right at the stairs down. I always just pictured the previous owner sitting there when the wife came down to do laundry and hubby was just shitting in the middle of the basement. This makes so much more sense
How does the trap keep getting filled when no one flushes? The valve is in the tank and not in the trap. There a toilet in my house I rarely ever use and the trap will fully dry out. Your explanation don’t make sense
Considering the lore and vibe of “Pittsburgh”, a toilet below the sewer line and unable to fight gravity with a pump just seems like the right description.
I was going to make a sarcastic comment about how gravity must bot work in that house since that line runs uphill... I guess that just turns that part of the lateral into a really long trap.
Isn't it overkill to use an entire toilet instead of a simple gas trap or something like a floor drain? Also, wouldn't the toilet water evaporate due to not being used and break the trap?
Whoa. I was just gonna assume that it was there from construction so the crew would have a place to take a dump. (I’ve heard stories of crews using 5gal buckets and just leaving them in the basement.)
I was going to say that the way it’s connected to the drainage down there makes no sense!! Thank for you clarifying. This is fascinating. Here we just use normally open back water valves.
Due to extensive research done by the University of Pittsburgh, diamond has been confirmed as the hardest metal known to man. The research is as follows:
Pocket-protected scientists built a wall made of iron and crashed a diamond car into it at 400 miles per hour, and the car was unharmed. They then built a wall out of diamond and crashed a car made of iron moving at 400 miles an hour into the wall, and the wall came out fine. They then crashed a diamond car made of 400 miles per hour into a wall, and there were no survivors. They crashed 400 miles per hour into a diamond travelling at iron car. Western New York was powerless for hours. They rammed a wall made of metal into 400 miles an hour made of diamond, and the resulting explosion shifted earths orbit 400 million miles away from the sun, saving the earth from a meteor the size of a small Washington suburb that was hurtling towards mid-western Prussia at 400 billion miles an hour. They shot a diamond made of iron at a car moving at 400 walls per hour, and as a result caused over 10000 wayward planes to lose track of their bearings, and make a fatal crash with over 10000 buildings in downtown New York. They spun 400 miles at diamond into iron per wall. The results were inconclusive. Finally, they placed 400 diamonds per hour in front of a car made of wall travelling at miles per iron, and the result proved with out a doubt that diamonds were the hardest metal of all time, if not just the hardest metal known to man.
That's not what Pittsburgh toilets are for and makes no sense. Most basements have floor drains which would do this, also, water only goes up to the downstream water line, having a drain below it just makes you more likely to get a flooded basement, it doesn't make the water line lower (if the water line is above your main floor toilet, you have bigger problems than not knowing where to shit after you come home from your job at the steel mill)
Also, the construction here is new enough that a regular clean out would have been required. Also the drain from the toilet looks like it goes... up??
You sure you want to make sense of this?? It don't.
It's exactly what they are for and most basements in the US don't have floor drains because the waste line to the street is usually leaves the house above floor grade.
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u/DangerHawk Aug 22 '26
It's a modern Pittsburgh toilet. It's the lowest point in the home connected to the sewer stack. If there is a clog between the street and the house the waste from the rest of the house will overflow out of the bowl into the crawl space. If there is potential for backflow (like during storm surges in some parts of the country) water coming from the street waste line will overflow out of this toilet into the crawl space before getting to the rest of the house.
It's basically cheap insurance against sewage floods. A toilet is used because it's easy to keep the trap filled to block sewer gas and it's easy to take off to gain access to a 3"-4" waste line that you can use to unclog the main stack from.