Four effective modular plumbing solutions

Affordable, doable modular plumbing solutions to create your ideal portable kitchen, bathroom or laundry room.

Interested in implementing plumbing into a portable setting?

Adding plumbing to a portable setting can seem downright daunting. But it shouldn’t be. Thanks to the development of user-friendly products and the successful experiences of the professionals who use them, modular bathrooms, kitchens and laundries are fast becoming highly popular sanitary solutions in almost any setting, regardless of usage.

1.  Portable bathroom solutions

Portable bathrooms offer many benefits. They provide a user with ultimate privacy in a more desired setting, protect the environment, and allow for some to save their septic systems by avoiding the use of their personal bathrooms.

To meet your own personal needs as well as those of your visitors, portable bathrooms can be an easy solution. Having the opportunity to provide luxurious bathroom facilities in any setting delivers a greater experience to the user. Due to public demand for greater privacy and convenience, portable restrooms are becoming increasingly popular in an array of settings, including offices, schools, retail and events.

Innovatively designed, Saniflo above-floor plumbing technology allows for quick and easy installations for both residential and commercial applications. Highly desired for its portability and exceptional performance, Saniflo drain pumps, macerators and grinders enable you to install plumbing virtually anywhere. As a result, they are commonly used to create portable bathrooms for both residential and commercial settings.

For example…

Ameri-Can Engineering is a portable restroom and shower manufacturer, well-known for outfitting large-scale events with portable bathrooms. The company supplied wheel-chair accessible pods for Super Bowl LV in Tampa in February 2021. For this large-scale portable-bathroom solution, Ameri-Can chief operating officer Keegan Campbell chose to equip each pod with the Sanicompact, a one-piece, dual-flush, water-saving toilet system.

Explains Campbell: “Saniflo products are the best solution for heavy commercial usage, because they eliminate chances of clogging and pump failures.”

The Sanicompact is a self-contained toilet system that incorporates a macerator right inside the fixture, rather than in a separate box. In addition to handling its own drainage, the system can discharge gray water from a nearby sink.

In creating these pods, Ameri-Can had to consider their building time, transportation, and overall performance. In the end, outfitting the pods with the Sanicompact system proved to be the least stressful part of the entire project.

Saniflo’s above-floor plumbing solutions can also facilitate the creation of a full bath that might also include both a sink and a shower — or perhaps even a laundry.

Based in San Rafael, CA, AR Plumbing recently took on the challenge of remodeling a floating home, including its plumbing. To avoid the headaches and heavy expense of busting through the structure’s concrete foundation, AR owner-CEO Adelso Rodas used the Sanicubic 1 to provide above-floor drainage for a full bathroom and washing machine.

The Sanicubic 1 is a pre-assembled simplex (single-pump) grinder system, capable of discharging up to 50 gallons of wastewater from multiple fixtures per minute. The system consists of (1) a grinding blade to break down incoming effluent; and (2) a pump to remove and route it through a small-diameter discharge pipe to the sewer or septic tank.

Both are encased in a highly durable plastic box that incorporates four different exterior inlets for incoming waste lines, from 1-½ inches to 4 inches in diameter, to boost installation flexibility. Highly sophisticated controls and a monitoring system help mitigate servicing issues.

According to Rodas, the Sanicubic 1 is “easy to install. Plus, the units are compact, with everything pre-assembled and ready to be put in place right away.” He also likes “how quiet the pump is.”

When planning your portable restroom, consider location and the usage. The Saniflo product offering is designed to accommodate a wide range of residential and commercial applications — from a small powder room in a home to frequently used public restrooms in commercial spaces.

By matching product to usage and simplifying the installation, Saniflo allows you to focus on the aesthetics of your ideal portable bathroom — ensuring that it will achieve your desired look, while being both sustainable and cost-friendly.

2. Modular Kitchen Solutions

When looking to build or upgrade a kitchen in a modular setting, optimizing limited space is key. Whether it be for a food truck, a recreational vehicle (RV), or the increasingly popular floating home, a modular kitchen is more affordable and far easier to install with above-floor plumbing. 

The Saniflo Sanivite is designed for residential installations and is appropriate for certain commercial applications. Small enough to fit inside a kitchen cabinet, the unit can handle drainage from a sink and dishwasher, discharging the gray water up to 16 feet vertically and/or 150 feet horizontally to the drain line. Approximately one third the size of a standard drain pump, the compact Sanivite won’t take up valuable space — a huge priority for a modular kitchen.

As with bathrooms and restrooms, the number of fixtures and the amount of drainage are vital considerations with a modular kitchen. For larger projects, Saniflo’s Sanicom 1 offers a powerful 1-horsepower pump to discharge up to 25 feet vertically and/or 250 feet horizontally. That pumping power makes the Sanicom 1, which can also handle water temperatures up to 194°F, ideal for commercial kitchens, including a food truck.

3. Modular Laundry Room

Again, with space-saving in mind, adding laundry facilities often seems as impossible as it is desirable in modular settings. Fortunately, the Saniswift Pro was designed to achieve the impossible when space is tight, whether the application is residential or commercial. Offering a more compact profile than other drain pumps, the Sanswift Pro is made for hard-to-reach places that are so common in modular settings, such as beneath a bathroom or kitchen sink.

The Saniswift Pro will handle gray water from up to three fixtures — say, a sink, a shower, a dishwasher or a washing machine — and is capable of discharging effluent up to 14 feet vertically and/or 140 feet horizontally.

4.  Modular sanitation stations

How many times have you decided against using a public restroom due to lack of privacy and a sanitary space? In doing so, you were probably put off by the inevitable awkward interactions and discomfort that routinely accompany the experience.

The covid-19 pandemic has made readily available sanitation solutions for public-restroom users an absolute must. This, in turn, has driven demand for portable bathrooms at both small and large events, as well as commercial establishments. A portable bathroom that looks and feels like home assures users of both privacy and proper sanitation.

These sanitation solutions can include proper air ventilation, natural lighting, and operating bath fixtures. Encountering a large enough space with an actual sink, people will readily take advantage of running water to wash their hands, rather than spraying a few drops of a less-than-effective hand sanitizer, as they would in a port-a-potty. Providing towels and other hand-drying solutions further elevates the experience.

No wonder then that sanitation stations are becoming so popular. The rising awareness of the value of clean hands has spurred the inclusion of hand-washing stations in public facilities as a more sustainable and hygienic solution.

Learn how Saniflo’s above-floor drain pumps can offer an effective, affordable solution for creating hand-washing stations: A new norm: hand-washing stations where below-floor drainage didn't exist

Running water and plumbing in a portable setting, whether residential or commercial, has become essential, elevating the space and the user experience in it. To create a portable plumbing solution, you will need either a drain pump, a macerator or a heavy-duty grinder that is easy to install and maintain.

Dedicated to creating solutions that are super-easy for the installer and super-effective for the user, Saniflo helps you overcome the stress of determining the best plumbing solution for your modular setting.