Blocked Toilets

There are many causes of blocked toilets, most of which can be avoided with proper care and attention. Blocked toilets can be caused by flushing large amounts of waste like wet wipes, nappies, sanitary products or too much toilet tissue. Wet wipes packets do in fact say that they are flushable, but they do not break up when flushed down the toilet. Because they don’t break up like toilet tissue, they can become stuck and will need to be removed manually.

Similarly, sanitary products should never be flushed down the toilet, because they can become lodged in the toilet and pipes and cause severe blockages. If the blockage in the toilet is caused by sanitary products, then it is imperative to remove it as soon as possible to avoid worse or more damaging blockages further down or deeper into the system. Blocked toilets can also be caused by foreign objects such as toilet cleaners and toilet brushes – for obvious reasons!

A lesser known but very real cause of blocked drains is using caustic soda to unblock a toilet. While it is often used as a drain cleaner, and can be an effective way to unblock a pipe, if it is not washed down the drain thoroughly, it builds up on the pipe walls and hardens, creating a whole new blockage.

Toilets can also block up if there isn’t enough flush water to wash away the waste. One of the ways this occurs is when the toilet syphon needs replacing (which we do for you). A toilet syphon has a rubber diaphragm that can split over time, which results in not enough water flushing through the toilet. We can replace these to get the toilet flushing as it should.

Another problem that causes a lack of sufficient water to flush away waste, leading to a blocked toilet, is a faulty toilet inlet valve. This is the object that controls the water flow into the cistern, and enables the cistern to fill up. Of course, the inlet valve gets used a lot if the toilet is used often, and can become slow over time. If an inlet valve is old and slow and someone flushes the toilet, it won’t give the cistern enough time to fill up, so the second user will only have half the amount of water to flush with. Then this can cause blockages, as there hasn’t been enough flush to wash waste away.

Sometimes it is possible to unblock a slow draining toilet at home using a plunger and other home remedies. However, these are not always successful and can sometimes make the problem worse. If you would prefer to unclog a toilet without a plunger, or you’ve already tried it to no avail, we have several methods we use to unblock toilets quickly, and with as little mess as possible. Our preferred method we implement to unblock toilets is using high pressure water jetting to break up the blockage and flush the debris through the system safely. As its name indicates, this is a great technique because it is extremely powerful and the water can easily work with the bends in the pipes, allowing us to deal with difficult blockages lodged deep in the plumbing system quickly and effectively.