Last Updated on: 15th October 2021, 09:11 pm
Sh*t happens
How many times in your life have you come to the bathroom opened up the lid and you see that it’s totally backed up? What do you do? You’ve got a plunger. You can definitely plunge it. Toilet auger send it down through there to see if you can grab whatever it is and pull it out. But what, if any of these things don’t work? What do you, how many times in your life has this happened?
You come into the bathroom and you flush, the toilet, and this happens, and you can see it right away. You know, what’s gonna happen, it’s gonna overflow. You see that one just came to the top, but if we flush it again, of course, that’s just gonna overflow. How many times does that happen to you? My children once played with our dog and then they tried to flush the dog poop paper bag. Maybe you’ve had guests, maybe you have a young child or maybe it was you? Maybe you stopped it up. Maybe somebody drops something down inside there either way. We’ve got to open this up.
Unclogging toilet with a plunger
Let me show you how. This is called a plunger. I know that sounds silly. Probably everybody knows that but say you didn’t know. This is a plunger and if there’s a great plunger because it has a stem at the bottom, you see it’s a flexible rubber.
We know that something stopped up inside of here. We can try the plunger, let’s see if it’ll do it will push down and actually pull up nothing’s happening right. Nothing at all little water is being forced through. So let’s list that toilet and just see do we plunge it out. Remember I showed you the auger. Let’s go ahead and try that pull that all your cable, all the way back, get this down into the trap of the toilet.
Push it hard, then we’re gonna crank the handle to see if we can grab whatever is down in there to put pressure on it, push it down through. Oh, I feel something you see. The tension see the tension on there right at the bottom of the toilet. I can feel it it’s got tension. Can you see this handle see that tension, something right at the bottom of the toilet? Don’T know what it is, so I should be all the way through still tension.
Did I grab it? You can see the water going down. Somebody put something down there. What is that you can see, there’s still something into that water still trying to drain. Lets clean this off and do it again, probably more paper towels.
What if the toilet is clogged with paper towels or women products?
So, what do we do sometimes it’ll break free and that water will flush but remember something those paper towels, that’s what we found they’re going to go down the sewer line, they’re not going to dissolve never put paper towels down yet ever never ever as well as Any female products talk about Kotex again, we’ve got that all girl all the way through that toilet trap went clear down to the bottom. You can see, I’m still filling up, but let’s flush, it take a look nice and clean. So those are two ways that you can try to: unclog your toilet.
Unclogging toilet with a hand-crank drain snake/auger. Is it recommended?
So maybe you have one of these little hand crank snakes and, of course it works the same way you hold the chair, you turn it. You can see the cable spinning and that would go down through the traffic. I would not recommend this number one.
Its going to scratch up the bottom of your toilet, really bad and then to this cable is pretty flimsy and see how easy it bends. This can actually hit your stockings and then double back and then you’ve got a knot in your cable that you won’t be able to pull the cable back. So, even if you rent a machine, okay, we’ve seen several methods to unclog the toilet, but what if it’s none of those work?
What if none of them work, we sent the auger all the way down through and we know that it went through the trap and we know that it went clear down to the flange clerkes through the toilet, but it’s still backed up. What do you do? First thing: you’re gonna do is shut off the water supply, you might have to go to your main, but whatever you got to do is shut that water off next run. Take the lid off okay, then we’re gonna go ahead and flush and get all this water out of here hold the handle and make sure that all that water goes out as much as possible. If it backs up, you know it puts overflows. Well, it overflows, but hopefully, you’ve got enough with your plunger that it won’t overflow. So you can see, we’ve got most of the water out of there. Next set your plunger down the toilet and get pushes much water out of here as possible.
Most common objects to clog the toilet are small toys, toothbrushes or small combs
Get it all. You can see it’s just holding a little bit of water and that’s good, because next, what we’re going to do is we’re going to go ahead and pull out these toilet bolts more than likely down here in this trap, somewhere in here or right at the flange here’s an object: most common objects are small toys like a Hot Wheel, perhaps a toothbrush or even a small comb, and it’s stuck right there.
We need to dismantle the toilet to unclog it
So we’ve got to take the toilet out and roll it upside down to see if we can get that to drop where we can get it out. Let’s take a look so using your wrench get this toilet not loose and you can spin it off. One of the problems that you may find remember, I just put this toilet all here for demonstrations, but one of the problems you might find is that toilet bowls were rusted and that’s a whole other video on how to take this toilet bowl off of here.
That can be a real pain and that’s why, when plumbers come out or roto-rooter or somebody that’s a drain cleaner, like us, we’re gonna charge a little bit more if we have to work on this toilet bowl to get it off of here and it takes – might take an hour might take two, but it is not easy.
I made it look easy because I just put this together before you guys see the demonstration. Let’s do the same thing: let’s go ahead and take this toilet mould off and normally these would have been cut down to size and a cap on top of it. But again, remember I just put this together for a demonstration for you to show you what happens and remember also the reason that we’re doing this is that something is lodged down in this section of the toilet.
Well, it has a trap. It’s right here, water level, right, here’s, the trap, the toilet has a trap right: here’s the water level that keeps the sewer gas from down below here from coming up and getting you have no odor, but something got stuck in this system right here and more than Likely I see they’re in this Bend or it’s right down at the flange and it’s laying across the cost of flange won’t let that water go down and, of course, all the waste is in there too remember we plunge the toilet.
Get rid of all the water in the toilet. Everywhere in the toilet.
We got as much water out as possible. We emptied the tank, make sure your tank is as empty as possible because when we pick it up and roll it over, then you’ve got a real mess. So I suggest that you actually take this outside and work on it. It rolling it around in your bathroom, it’s really the small space plus it might be tile. You know floor scratch. It up could break the toilet. So I’m going to show you how to set this lid someplace safe because it breaks very easily. So I’m just going to move it out of the way to move, all the tools that you have out here, it’s nice to lay out some towels. If you have them, make sure that you have all of your nuts and bolts to make sure you’ve got all those put them in your pocket or whatever. Usually, you would replace it? Usually, you would replace these after you pull it, so keep them handy. The way I like to do this is this grab hold right here in the center, and this will make it so it’s very easy to carry pull it up.
Remember it’s got wax holding it down, pull it up and it will wattle it out.
You should walk it backward or forwards. Just carry it right after you’ve gone outside lay the toilet on its side, and you can see this one right away. There’s a toy jammed down in there could be anything down in here I mean hot wheels. Are a big number two item? Perhaps does this mean the child dropped it in there? No, it could have fallen off of the top of the toilet. Maybe it was on the top, All kinds of things can get stuck in your toilet. What’s amazing is how did it get from here and go through that trap come through this little elbow and get all the way down here. That’s, what’s always amazing to me, but you have to play with this.
Assemble the toilet again
This is stuck in your heart. Remember how much tension we had on the auger when we were trying to pull it out of there because it grabbed a hold of this. You got it, we got it loose and we can pull it out. Okay, we’ve got it all back together. Remember we tighten up those toilet bolts.
We also put a new wax ring down below next thing you want to do, is go ahead and, put you know your lid back on the top and then, of course, tighten up that water supply line and let it fill up so we’re ready to test the System, how do you do that? Of course, we could just flush. It yeah we wouldn’t really want to make sure that it’s clean that everything is going to go through throw some toilet paper in there use a flush let’s see what it does oh yeah took that right out nice and clean good swirling action jets are working.
How to unclog the toilet in even more ways
Mr. Blue Plumbing’s Mark Harrison referred me to their new article, which details even more and very creative ways to unclog the toilet. If you want to learn how to fix a clogged WC using hair conditioner or even Coca-Cola, then this article will help.
