Flush it down

Emily sent me this picture. One of her little ones poured a whole bottle of bubble bath out in their upstairs bath and it reappeared in the basement toilet. At least her sewer lines are clean now.

They’re all coming to visit us in two and a half weeks. Whoo-hoo! Good thing we have our new, mega-flush toilet installed in the guest bathroom. I just looked for my earlier post about our new mega-flush toilet in order to link it in that last sentence, and I couldn’t find it. Instead I found a draft version, entitled, “That Shit is Going Down” that I had never published. So if you’ve seen an earlier version of this, sorry for the repeat, but I think this never got published…so here it is:

The first time one of our guests clogged our hall bathroom toilet we figured one of their small children must have flushed something that shouldn’t have been flushed. The second time (some months later) that a guest clogged the guest toilet, there were no children involved. Random chance or do we have a problem here? The third time a guest clogged that toilet I was like, omg, I’m failing as a hostess. I’m not even providing working indoor plumbing!

I mean, the only thing worse than standing in your bathroom willing that shit to go down (“go down, go down, go down – oh no, no, not over the top, nooooo!!!), the only thing worse, is standing in your friend or relative’s house praying that shit goes down. Nope! That was not going to happen to any of my guests ever again. 

We had a plumbing company snake a camera through the plumbing from the toilet all the way to the street. There was a little bit of root damage toward the street end of the line from that mesquite tree that we removed last year, but otherwise, the line was great. 

Apparently the culprit was the toilet itself. I did my research and discovered that the max gallons per flush allowed by Federal regulations is 1.6 gallons. Another common flush volume is 1.28, and some low flow toilets use a scant gallon. Obviously in the desert we really shouldn’t be wasting water, but I figure if we have to flush twice each time just to get the toilet paper down, we’re better off with a flow rate that gets the TP down in one flush. Plus, never again are my guests going to be caught watching in horror as it swirls and swirls and slowly rises to the surface. So drought or not, I’m going with the max flush rate.

I also learned something else about toilets. It’s not just flush rate that matters. The plumbing inside the toilet before it reaches the pipes in the wall is called the trapway. The new toilet I bought advertises a “CLOG-FREE FLUSH – Facilitated by the largest glazed trapway on the market at 2-3/8-in. wide.” That’s right, my new guest bathroom toilet has a really big hole!!

When John installed the new toilet, he discovered the issue (and I think this is the part I had previously mentioned in an earlier blog post). The old toilet was fine, but our contractor had installed it with the wide seal ring slid halfway across the drain opening, blocking half the opening at the hight of the floor. John went ahead and (properly) installed the new toilet anyway, even though we now knew that the old one had been fine, just installed wrong.

So come on out and visit me, knowing that you can flush with confidence. But maybe I’ll set the bubble bath up out of reach 😉

To send me a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

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