Blocked Toilet

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

If in doubt, call a plumber.

Otherwise reflect that it’s just nuts and bolts, rubber gloves, a screwdriver and a wrench. You’ll be finished in 90 minutes without raising a sweat.

It’s so easy.

A word of warning: Unless your toilet is totally blocked, either make one last use of it, or arrange to use a neighbor’s toilet once you get started. Once you get started there’s nowhere to go!

I place a strong plastic sheet or similar over my workbench to protect the surface from dings and dents. There’s very little “dirty’ about the job.

As each component comes off, it is laid out in sequence.

You can see above, from left to right, that first I removed the lid of the cistern and carried it in here. No sweat!

I turned off the mains water, and flushed one last time to empty the cistern. If your toilet is blocked and emptying slowly you may want to wait fifteen minutes until the last of the water has drained away. You’ll be left with a little in the bowl. Don’t worry, we’ll remove that easily when the time comes.

I unscrewed the water feed pipe and the screws that hold the cistern to the pedestal.

One of the pedestal bolts was gummed up tight and I could not loosen the nut. I hacksawed it right off.

I removed the toilet seat.

That done I was able to tilt the pedestal forward slightly, so that no water would escape from the bowl (see?!) and carry it into the bathroom.

The plug was in the tub so that any large objects would not sail down the bath drain and block IT!

With a four-litre pail to hand and rubber gloves ON hands I carefully removed the material that was blocking the drain and tossed that into a garbage bag.

With the same four-litre pail I rinsed off, then detergent-soaked, then scouring-powder cleaned the outside of the pedestal. It took me about 15 minutes to remove the caked-on grime of 40-odd years, but now my pedestal looks pristine.

Once all the 4-liter flushes were done, I eased a screwdriver blade under the bath plug so that the water, by now still, could drain slowly. The remaining debris was lifted out and tossed into the garbage pail.

A couple of 4-litre flushes rinsed the last traces of detergent and scouring powder from the pedestal. I tipped it this way and that to remove as much water as possible and left it to air-dry.

The lavatory looks as if it is ready for one of those squat toilets, complete with rinsing water!

You can see the little trap to my mains taps.

I vacuumed the grit and debris where the pedestal sits, then wiped down the area.

After that it was just a matter of re-building the unit in the inverse sequence of dis-assembly. An easy job, since everything was laid out in sequence on my work bench.

Search