Not a lot of people know this – Sweden – ech2o newsletter snippet

2 x outlets are required in all showers in student accommodation in Sweden. This little known fact was discovered by Kat (who is Swedish) after a student, who was renting her flat in Uppsala, fell asleep in the shower after a late night out, blocked the outlet and brought down the ceilings of the flat below and the flat below that.
Whilst googling for an image of a shower tray with two outlets (with no luck) I did come across thisneat bit of kit designed and manufactured in the UK by Serene Bathrooms. Apparently the vortex waste unit can drain away 33 litres of water a minute, though I couldn’t find any info as to how it works and whether you have to increase the diameter of the waste pipe to accommodate that flow. Since the same website also states that ‘the average shower flow rate in the UK is only 17 litres/minute’ a claim that is not just wrong but also shows a remarkable lack of understanding of what a high flow rate from a shower is, maybe that 33 litres/minute figure was just plucked out of thin air. But I do still like the sound of a vortex waste unit! And then Colin from EC1 bathrooms found this shower tray from Bette. It is 280 mm deep and incorporates an overflow and an outlet. I’ve been trying to work out whether a drunk Swedish students could block both. We reckon they could so we are now wondering if Kat dreamed the whole thing up; not the flood for that definitely happened but the existence of the legislation. If anyone out there can help us out that would be great.