Common causes behind toilet clogs

We have all been there before – we go to use the bathroom, only to discover (to our horror) that our toilet is clogged up and we have to fight with our plunger (or our plumber) to get the problem resolved!

Inadvertently clogging the toilet happens all the time, but you can end up doing a pretty significant amount of damage to your plumbing and your toilet itself if you don’t provide as many of these common causes as possible. On top of that, most folks just aren’t all that excited about having to dive into their toilet with a plunger in an effort to kind of get everything “unstuck” – especially after Taco Tuesday!

 

To help you out, here are some tips and tricks to avoid most of the common root causes behind toilet clogs that you are likely to come across.

 

Flushing the wrong stuff down the drain

 

At the end of the day, every toilet is designed for two things into things only – to flush down human waste and toilet paper, and nothing else.

 

When you’re talking about human waste in toilet paper, even a significant amount of both, the odds are pretty good that you aren’t going to have to deal with any serious clogs. Even if things do come up a little bit, a quick push or two with a plunger should be more than enough to get you back to better than brand-new.

 

It’s when things like cotton balls, tissues, dental floss, diverse, feminine products, and more find themselves in the bowl of the toilet and flushed down the tubes clogs start to happen. Try to avoid anything other than human waste in toilet paper going into your toilet and you should be good to go.

 

An ineffective flapper will have you dealing with clogs more frequently than not

 

Like everything else man-made, eventually the internals and hardware inside of your toilet will eventually wear out and stop working as well as they did when they were brand-new. The “flapper” inside the tank of your toilet is the rubber gasket that has to open and close to allow water in the tank to flush down into the bowl.

If your flapper doesn’t close all of the way it’s going to allow water from the tank to leak into the bowl on a regular basis, resulting in weak flushes that will inevitably have your toilet backing up more often than not.

 

You have a couple of options, but the only ones that are going to work in the long term replacing the internals in your toilet or swapping out your old toilet for a brand-new one.