Kung Fu Maintenance shows a dishwasher install that needs an air gap but sink does not have hole how plus why to tie up drain line.
OK. Every once in a while you run into a situation where you got a sink and installing a dishwasher, and you don’t have an air gap. What can you do? You know, an air gap’s pretty much necessary, because the dishwasher runs into the garbage disposal or into the sink, and you don’t want bacteria from the disposal or from the sink drain to wind up going down into your dishwasher.
And this dishwasher, I still need to mount. It’s got the mounting screws that need to go in the top here, and a bit of adjustment, just to make everything line up properly. Adjust the feet, and make everything good here. This one’s just been set in place.
But as far down below, let me show you what we’ve got going on. Oh, man. And the drain line has just been set in place. So we need a clamp there in order to clamp that on. So we can’t run this yet.
But if you don’t have an air gap, what you can do is tie up the drain line. We don’t want that drain line to just go straight in like this, because gravity can draw the water back in, and especially from the drain. Now, there’s a couple considerations here.
This one, I’ve got a pull-out faucet which allows this to pull out, and it’s going to pull that out. So we don’t want that to bump into our drain line. So that’s a consideration there. So we definitely want to position this in a spot that that’s not going to happen.
So what I’m going to do here is take the drain line back to right here on the disposal. And again, what that’s going to do is make a loop that comes up and over. And it will never fall off, because what I’ll use is I’ll use this military grade cable tie right here and tie this puppy up.
Again, we’re just kind of creating our own little trap here. And we’ll leave it loose enough so if we need to do something different in the future, we can. But as you can see, I’m just going around here, taking my cable tie, and tying it up. There we go.
That’s really all we need, again, leaving enough room so I can do something different in the future if I need to, and do what we want it to do. And we’re all set there. And this, I can just cut this off, and I’ll leave myself a little room, just in case I wanted to tighten it up at all, or whatever I needed to do.
But easy enough. If I ever had to replace this, this screw comes loose here. Not a big deal. Everything’s good there. That’s one way around it, if you did not have an air gap.
This is a stainless steel sink, and cutting through here, you know– what you want for this is a four-hole sink so you can install a air gap, and that’s the ideal situation. But anyway, this is a way around it, if you did not have that.
So now, hooking up the dishwasher here, what we need is a clamp to clamp it on there. And these usually have different sizes to trim to, this part here. This one, I think we won’t need to trim that. We’ll just put it straight on there.
Get my screwdriver set up here, and I’ve got my clamp here. I almost wish I had one size larger clamp, but that’s going to do it. There we go. That’s got a clamp coming there. I’ll just tighten that a nice quarter-turn past tight.
We’re good to go there. And move our deals in over the top there. Now we can test-run it. Make sure nothing’s going to leak on us. Got the hot water line open.
You can see, on the hot side, my particular setup is a 3/8 to 3/8 around here. OK, and that feels a little bit loose. Pays to check these things out. Yeah. This thing’s definitely loose.
OK. And the water is on there. So now, we can fire up the dishwasher, this new dishwasher here. OK. Just going to put it ahead, latch in. Going to listen for the fill cycle.
There it goes. While that’s filling, we’ll just feel back there, make sure we have no leaks. Underneath here, make sure I see no water dripping underneath there. Could take the pan off, but I think I should be able to tell. Oh, yeah.
No, we’re nice and dry, so that’s good. Most likely, I’m going to need to adjust the feet anyway. And this is only just set up there. But for now, just checking to make sure our drain cycle does what want it to.
And we’d want to make sure that water stays, actually, in this loop, down to about here, because we don’t want the water to back up into this dishwasher line. OK, so I’ll just advance it to the drain cycle, and if anything goes wrong, then I’ll just open the door back up here.
There goes the drain cycle. You saw the water shoot up and over, right through the disposal. You want to look for any leaks here. Everything’s nice and dry there. And check it all the way back here, make sure everything’s good. And it is.
OK. And the water emptied out here. It actually seems like it siphoned all the way through, so it’s not really what I want it to do. So I’d like it to leave water in the hose, up to this point here.
Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. I’ll advance it to the next fill cycle. You can hear it go there. The main thing is, we have no leaks.
And again, we’ve got our water line looped up and over, and tied up. And what I could do is attempt to raise that line up even a little bit more. I’ve got it tied there, but I can always tie it up higher. So let’s see how much room that I’ve got here.
Now once again, I’m just trying to tie that up about as high as that can go. There we go. I’ll just loop it into the sink like that. And my hope is that would create a little trap. It won’t be quite an air gap.
OK. So I’m going to put it ahead to the drain cycle, and you’re going to see the water jump to this spot here, cycle through. Here goes. We’re going to watch for it when it stops to see if it’ll keep water in the line there. There you go.
Hopefully, you saw that go through. And we’ll wait until the water stops. There, it’s stopped now. Again, it came up and over. I do believe it left more water trapped in the line this time. That’s good.
You know, it’s tricky to tell exactly. But at least we got a better chance of a seal there. It’s also possible that it completely siphoned up and over. You know, really, the best way is to have an air gap installer install an air gap.
Again, this is just a measure for doing what you can if you did not have an air gap. But sometimes, all you can do is make it better. You can’t necessarily make it perfect. So this is just making it better. And I suppose the other thing you could do would be, install an air gap inside here, but if it ever overflowed, it’d be overflowing inside here, which is not really a good situation.
Yeah, this is about the best I think, we can do, tying up the uh– Anyway, our dishwasher is hooked up. No leaks. Now, all I got do is mount it up to the cabinet.
And this is a good temporary measure to keep any back-up from going into your sink. By putting the line higher, if you did have a sink backup or something like that, it just makes it a lot less likely that it’s going to go up and over, and back into your dishwasher, especially as, you know, the line’s higher. This is not a perfect situation.
I’m going to go ahead and order a drill bit for drilling through here, special drill bit. Couple ways to do it. You can search on YouTube or eventually, I’ll try to make a video, and put it up, drilling for an air gap. So you can convert this over to have an air gap. But at least this is a temporary measure for now, just to make it better. We’re good to go.
And that’s the dishwasher. And we went ahead and mounted, added the screws to the plate here, so that everything is nice and secure. Good to go.