Plumbing First: Plan Your HVAC And Plumbing Before It’s Too Late
Everyone, welcome back. I’m here with Adrien Hinse, and he is one of the owners of Hinse Brothers Mechanical out of Sherwood Park and Beaumont here in Alberta, and today we’re going to be talking about HVAC and plumbing preparation for renovations. Okay, if your renovation budget doesn’t include HVAC or plumbing prep, you’re setting yourself up for a mid- project nightmare. Renovations are exciting until the walls are open and you find out the plumbing isn’t up to code or your new HVAC layout can’t actually breathe. Whether it’s a sleek kitchen upgrade, a fresh bathroom, or a full basement suite, getting HVAC and plumbing right at the start saves time, money, and future headaches.
All right, so I’m going to jump into the questions right away for you. Question number one: when it comes to, you know, renovations and preparing for renovations for bathrooms, kitchens, and basements, what’s the biggest mistake you see homeowners make when they’re planning a renovation involving plumbing or HVAC?
A Huge Renovation Mistake
I’d say it’s not so much of a mistake, but when planning for a basement development, first thing we need to know is, is it going to be like a legal suite, or is this going to be a mother- in- law suite, or just an added space to the home? These are pretty important details, but one of the main things missed is often HVAC. So everybody knows we need plumbing, we need to add this bathroom, add a kitchen bar, whatever it is that you’re looking at doing, but HVAC is pretty important in a basement, especially.
We all know that usually the basement is known as the colder space in the house, right, and so what can we do to remedy that is kind of we want to look at a return. We want to make sure there’s adequate supply air for each room as well as proper returns. We’d like to put them low- wall returns so that we’re actually drawing the heat from the ceiling down to where the occupants are kind of positioned mostly, right? Super important to have a look at that, and ventilation as well.
Okay, that’s really good advice. We are getting ours renovated soon, and we’re going to be looking to make sure that that is happening in all areas, our areas as well. So, when someone’s thinking about adding a basement suite, what are the first mechanical questions they should ask?
Are You Building a Legal Suite Or Just Developing Your Basement?
First mechanical questions off the top of my head: I’d be looking at, if it’s a legal suite, it’s obviously going to need its own heat source, okay, so it’s pretty important. We’d have to put in either like a new furnace or some type of radiant heating in the floor. There’s different options we can go over.
Another one is, if it’s an added space, do I want to be able to control the temperature downstairs, right? Everybody knows if you’ve got, say, a two- story home, you’ve got air conditioning in that home, it’s going to be blowing cold air into the basement at the same time. One thing we can do is add a zoning system so you can have a thermostat in the basement and be able to control your temperature, so you can stop the AC from going downstairs, even top up the heat if needed, you know, to maintain that consistent warm temperature that you want, right?
When it comes to plumbing, like we just want to make sure that we have the plan 100 percent in place so that we can, you know, plan for drainage and venting appropriately as well.
Okay, now, when it comes to assessing things, how do you assess whether an existing HVAC system can handle a new bathroom, kitchen, or suite?
Separate Ventilation For Legal Suites Is Important
So, if it is a legal suite, we do need to do a separate ventilation for the bathroom and for your range hood as well, so those will be separately ducted outside—bath fan for the bathroom and range hood for the kitchen. If it is a mother- in- law suite and you’ve got an HRV, we can actually tap in, as long as the capacity will handle it, we can tap in and do your ventilation for the bathroom from existing HRV, but it is recommended, because HRVs do have a limited capacity, that we do a separate bath fan. I would say the range hood too— we definitely want to, that has to be ducted separately.
Mhm, and another thing too is, the reason why people like to do legal suites is, they are more costly to set up, but the one thing is, you definitely have your own kind of ecosystem. When you have a legal suite downstairs, you’ve got the insulation in the ceiling, you’ve got your own separate heating system; water can be combined, but you’re not going to share the return air. So if somebody’s cooking downstairs, you know, you’re not enjoying all the smells upstairs, right, and vice versa. So you’ve got some, I guess, some separation, personal separation, yeah, so you’re not comingling, you know, your breathing space and all of that fun stuff.
Cool, well I like that, that’s really good advice. Now, can you walk us through a typical pre- reno inspection or planning session, what that looks like from your side?
Pre-Renovation Planning
So, usually, hopefully we’ve got plans in place. We can go and mark out kind of where the plumbing needs to be. One thing we also need to—that is overlooked, common, I forgot to mention this— is all new basements or renovations need to have a backflow prevention. Okay, so that’s basically stopping any backup from the sewer coming from outside into the home. Okay, so it’s a one- way check valve, allows the flow away from the home and not back in.
Gotcha.
So we need to check that out, make sure there is one; if not, we’d have to add provision to install a new one. The other thing is, we do a walk- around, mark out the walls; would be a good idea to have a plan where all the bedrooms are going, where the kitchen’s going to be, that type of thing, look at existing drainage and water, and come up with a plan on how we’re going to add the changes you want.
Okay, and then you also look at, like, capacity for gas and water and all of that, like sizing and whatnot?
Yeah, 100 percent. That brings me to, do we have enough power?
Oh, okay.
Assess Your Power Needs for the Basement
So, do you have enough power to have a basement suite or add all the equipment you want? Do you want a new range, I want a new dryer— these types of things all need power. One way we can make sure you have enough power is by adding some gas appliances, so if you want to add a gas— or sorry, an electric— stove downstairs, we could always add a gas range upstairs, right?
Right.
So that’ll free up some power for downstairs. Same with the dryer— dryer uses quite a bit of power, right, so we could do either a gas dryer upstairs or downstairs and lower the power requirement, so, without having to do an actual electrical upgrade, we can use the gas to kind of expand your reach with the existing power supply you have.
Awesome, that’s really good, good planning, good idea.
And we look at gas sizing to make sure you’ve got enough to handle all that, so we might have to run another gas line from the meter, this type of thing. We just want to make sure there is enough supply for immediate demands and also have a look: is there anything in the future you might be looking at, like are you looking at putting in a garage heater, looking at doing a barbecue, something like that?
So, right, okay.
Contact Hinse Brothers Mechanical Before Renovations Start
No, that’s good— things that, you know, you guys should be looking into before you go ahead and start that renovation. So call a good company like Hinse Brothers Mechanical out of Sherwood Park and Beaumont. They cover all of Edmonton, by the way, so they’ll come to any, any location and do the pre- planning work for your renovation project, so don’t be worried about that. You can get basically anywhere within the whole region within about a half an hour, so it’s not like it’s far out of town to go from Sherwood Park to Edmonton, right.
So, let’s talk about common HVAC or plumbing limitations of older homes that people might not realize. So what are some of those limitations for HVAC and plumbing systems from older homes?
That’s a great question. For an older home, we usually, usually would like to have the lines scoped, okay, so if you’ve got cast- iron lines or clay tile, things like that, it’s definitely really important to see what we’re working with, right, and not to mention the piping in the house. If it’s old cast and stuff like that, it could be quite scaled up or rusted, that type of thing. We’d want to make sure it’s all intact.
You know, whenever possible, if we’re working with a space that’s been completely gutted, open walls and that, it’s a great time to replace the drainage, replace the water lines. Copper lines last a long time, but do they have poly- b water lines? Do those need to be replaced? They are susceptible to just pinhole leaks over time, right, that’s one of them. If the copper is really old, the joints could start to let go over time. You know, if the walls are open, it’s generally a good time to replace the piping.
Do You Need To Replace Your Piping?
Sure.
The one major limitation would be, if it’s under concrete, it’s a lot of work usually to replace all the underground drainage.
Mhm.
So, before doing something like that, we just do a scope of the lines and see what the condition is.
Sure.
Especially that old concrete is really hard— like it’s had a, you know, few decades to harden up and it’s just harder than fresh concrete, let’s just put it that way, it’s so tough.
Yeah.
Are there differences in prep for upstairs kitchen and bathroom versus basement development kitchen and bathroom?
Yeah, upstairs kitchen and bathroom, we usually have a couple of different options. If we can access it from below, it’s usually nice; we can use the floor joist, run the drainage and that. We are limited to, if you’ve got solid joists, we can’t really drill through those for venting and drainage, things like that, so we do have to have a look at the site, see if we’re working with engineered joists or what we’re doing.
The other thing: it’s going to affect downstairs; you may need some bulkheads, that type of thing— need to do an inspection. Upstairs, we have done situations where we wanted to make— people wanted to make modifications without demoing below, so if we can remove the flooring and, like, the plywood, we can often do repairs just from the top floor, right, modifications, mind you.
Nice. So there are options, and obviously it’s different between working with floor joist and concrete.
Right.
Next question I have here is, how should homeowners think about permits and inspections relating to HVAC and plumbing before and after renovation?
Get Permits and Inspections First
So, basically, if you’re planning on doing— adding bathrooms or doing any major renovations, all municipalities, pretty much, in particular Edmonton, they definitely want you to go through the channels of— apply for a building permit, so have a plan, exactly what it is you want done, and then go to them and just explain, like, this is what I want. In Edmonton, you do a submission, it goes through the process, they’ll decide whether or not you need a building permit, right, and if you do need, need a building permit, they’ll issue you your HVAC permit, like your electrical permit, your plumbing permit, gas, and you can basically assign your contractors from there.
Okay, I can’t just go ahead and pull plumbing permit to add a bathroom for you; you have to go through these channels, or else they’ll basically cancel our permit until there’s a building permit in place.
Gotcha. Okay, so there’s some steps to the process, and you guys got to kind of do some research on that and look on how you would do that for your municipality.
Have you ever had to rescue a reno that went sideways, and they skipped planning and just kind of a disaster area when you walked in? Have you ever had to do that?
There’s been a couple of occasions where we had to go in and take over a job that’s already been started by another contractor. Some of the planning wasn’t completed yet, so they just went ahead and did some of the plumbing without having their building permit in place, and then a lot of changes had to be made.
Right, okay. There was a missed— usually what happens is there’s a missed backwater valve, just certain things in the planning stages that have to happen first. Like, you want to do that first, and then from there you can do your plumbing, your basement groups, you can make all the changes you want.
Other things too: my basement’s super cold, I didn’t think about doing the changes for the HVAC— right, they just did the plumbing for the bathrooms and a bath fan and then realized after the fact that some of the heat runs were actually covered up, okay, and then returns weren’t added. Right, so we had to go in and make those changes, right, so it was going to be super cold down there.
The other thing too is making sure that there’s enough— when you add a basement furnace, there has to be enough vents for the capacity of the furnace.
Right, okay.
Consider Your HVAC System from the Start
So most houses where you’ve just got the common basement, they just have a few heat runs downstairs, but you actually have to dump a lot of extra air when you add a separate furnace, right, so that the furnace doesn’t overheat and— type things. So you do have to have a proper design in place and submit that to the city in order to get an HVAC permit.
So, gotcha, so there’s a lot to know, a lot of things going on.
All right, last question: if someone’s planning a reno six months from now, what should they be doing today from an HVAC or plumbing standpoint?
Hinse Brothers Mechanical Can Help From Start to Finish
The first thing would be to have your plan in place and then have a walk- through with the plumbing and HVAC in particular, and electrical I’d say too, basically to get the idea of what’s possible. So even before submitting for your building permit, y— definitely have a walk- through with your prospective subcontractors, okay, and go over what’s possible, what isn’t possible. What can we do with the plumbing? Is it— does it make sense to put the bathroom here, the kitchen there, that type of thing?
Gotcha.
And also kind of go through the requirements for, like, a legal suite, or whatever suite you’re planning on doing.
Okay, awesome. Well, that was, that was great, man, that was awesome. I appreciate you coming in and sharing your information with the people out there. Guys, if you’re looking for an amazing plumbing and HVAC company, look no further than Hinse Brothers Mechanical out of Sherwood Park. Thanks so much.
Thank you very much.