If you are about to start the process of remodeling your home's bathrooms, you know that a great deal of pre-planning must happen in order for you to end up with the bathroom of your dreams. The bathroom should be a place to relax, a room crafted with sleek fittings and one that is easy to maintain. You may have been a bit dismayed when you looked at the labor costs involved with changing out a floor drain in your bathrooms, but there is a less expensive way to achieve the perfect drains for your bathroom, and that is to include trench drain systems in your room's design.

Traditional floor drains are round in shape; you have seen them and likely have them installed in the floor of your bathroom as well as laundry room, and by your water heater. The flooring in the shower area must be built to provide a slope to the floor, in order for the water to be guided toward the drain by gravity. With a round floor drain, this is a tricky part of the installation, and also puts limits on the size of tile you can use in the shower as well, because round drains do not usually accommodate larger tile or stone pieces.

A channel drain eliminates all of the hassles with installing a round floor drain. The channel drain, which may also go by the name of linear drain, shower trough drain, strip drain, trench shower drain or line drain, is straight and rectangular in shape. It fits into a specially designed trough or trench, so that the linear drain is flush with the surrounding flooring. Because it is much easier to design a shower floor with a slope going in a single direction, as is needed with the shower trough drain, the installation time for the trench drain systems is greatly reduced from that required for a standard round floor drain installation.

One aspect that makes the channel drain so popular with homeowners and contractors is built into the trough itself. In order to ensure that there is never any standing water inside the shower trough drain, the drain is designed with an internally sloped channel. Once the trench shower drain is in place, gravity takes over to keep standing water at bay.

You can also use a linear drain for a tub to shower conversion in your bathroom remodel. This gives you many interior design options for your new bathroom, so you do not have to feel limited by what is already in place, but can let your design creativity take wing in order to achieve the bathroom of which you dream.