Anyone in a home, school, hospital, hotel or other building where ADA accessibility is a necessity will find that the bathroom can pose several problems. Primary is that it can be very hard to enter a shower stall in a wheelchair, because edges are often used around the shower pan in order to keep the water from flowing out of the shower and onto the rest of the bathroom floor. There is, however, an elegant solution to this common problem for those designing a new bathroom or anyone who is planning a tub to shower conversion, and that is to utilize trench drain systems in the bathroom. A trench shower drain keeps the water inside the shower stall, yet gives you a valuable barrier-free shower that anyone can use.

The Practical Linear Drain

A linear drain, also known as a shower trough drain, is rectangular and long in shape. It snugly fits into a trench that is put into the shower area and into which the trench shower drain is placed, with the final result being a drain that is flush with the finished floor in the shower pan. As with any shower floor drain, the trench drain systems require that the shower floor be sloped toward the drain so that the water flows into it. Because the drain is flush with the surrounding flooring, it works perfectly as a roll-in shower for a wheelchair.

Other considerations for choosing the shower trough drain over a round floor drain in your tub to shower conversion is the cost. A round floor drain also requires that the flooring that surrounds the drain be sloped on multiple planes so that the water reaches the round drain via gravity. This takes a great deal of construction time to create, and thus drives up the labor costs for a tub to shower conversion. On the other hand, with a trench shower drain, there is only one plane that has to be built in order to get the water to roll into the drain, and thus you save on labor time.

Trench drain systems are used to create the hot new bathroom design trend of wet room showers. These have drains placed in front of the shower doors and require no edging to keep the water in place, and thus glass doors can span all the way from floor to ceiling, or there can be no doors at all, to give the room an open and spacious look, yet still have the water drain properly.

Trench drain systems' manufacturers have more information on uses and designs for these shower drains.