It is called getting a licensed plumber in that can do the gas piping for you legally, not some hacked together solution.
you sure will because it is a requirement...remember neatness... inspectors love that..and yes just raise it up alittle higher that should be fine....ben srKirwin - Thanks for your helpful comment. That is good information to have. I think I'm going to just move the heater up a few inches to accomodate the sediment trap. The manual says a minimum ceiling clearance of 16", which is easily attainable. It frustrates me that the diagrams they show in the manual are physically impossible to assemble. I think that I have the best chance of pleasing my inspector if I add the sediment trap. Thanks again!
Hi Jon - So, I did what I said I would do: I raised the furnace up about 5.5 inches from the subfloor (so 4" above the sill plate), if I remember correctly. As such, everything fit perfectly in a standard 8' wall with a double top plate; the distance to the chimney was fine. In the end, the instructions are poorly written, but I squeezed a nice little drip leg in there, and if the inspector had looked at it, I'm sure he would have said that was great... but he just came and signed everything off without looking around much. You'll notice that the furnace has these legs that are supposed to stand on the sill plate, so I just cut two 4" pieces of 2x4, and secured them to the studs to make very small platforms for those thin metal legs on the furnace. Then, to get the gas line in from the side, you have to drill through not one, but two 2x4s (the little one you added and the stud), but there is enough room for everything if you do it this way. All inspectors are different, I'm sure - so no guarantees that this will please your inspector - but I must say that doing more could possibly be better than doing less. This is just a theory, but when the inspectors first started coming around, they spent more time looking at my stuff. By the last several visits, they just checked things off. My suspicion is that they know what to look for at a glance - and don't need to get on their knees and look at the big details. One thing that might also help you: I had to do a pressure test on the line. So, it would have helped to NOT put the valve part on until after the inspection. I had to take it off to put on a cap so I could test at 10psi for 24 hours. The gauge was only $10 or $20, and I was able to pressurize the line with my bicycle pump.I'm in the same boat. Please throw a line if possible. Hard to believe/understand how Williams Co. deemed those instructions fit to print. Thanks, Jon