Express Sewer & Drain Blog

What you don’t know about stubborn toilet clogs (and how to remove them) might only make matters worse for your DIY clog removal efforts. While there are some handy tools and clog-removal tricks you can use to better deal with clogs and toilet repair, the problem may not actually concern your toilet, but rather your home drain pipes.

In this blog post, we break down what it takes to break down toilet clogs, as well as what you need to do if problems such as these persist.

Use Conventional Tools… Correctly

If you haven’t done so already, you should definitely try using a conventional plunger to remove clogging from your toilet; however, make sure you’re doing so correctly, otherwise you’ll wind up wasting your own time over nothing. To effectively remove stubborn, persistent toilet clogs, you can’t plunge away at the pipe opening frantically, or with too much force.

Rather, you must slowly build up water movement and pressure through fluid, continuous plunging motion. Plungers are meant to build up pressure within pipes, and remove clogs as pressure becomes more and more powerful.

Often, those trying to remove a stubborn toilet clog will use a plunger to forcibly push air through their pipes, and repeat until clogged materials partially break apart. This does not work nearly as well as pressurization (if at all) when it comes to removing persistent toilet clogs.

Snaking Your Toilet Pipe

If conventional plungers don’t do the trick in removing a particularly stubborn toilet clog, you may want to try using a professional-grade drain auger on your clogged pipes before calling a professional. These tools are relatively simple to use, and can help homeowners get rid of almost all drain and toilet clogs with ease; best of all, you can often find augers (or “drain snakes”) at your local home improvement store, and use them to tend to your pipes professionally and affordably.

To use a drain auger on your persistent toilet clogs, snake the barbed, curved tip of the auger down through your toilet pipe. These tools (the same ones used by professional plumbing services) are specially designed to latch onto and break apart severe clogging. Once inside your clogged toilet pipe, keep snaking the auger until your reach an obstruction.

To fragment and break apart clogged materials, all you will have to do is rotate the snake clockwise and slowly push against the obstruction. This motion makes the auger physically latch onto clogged debris, and separate stubborn materials capable of withstanding pressure and flushing.

While drain augers are effective solutions for most moderate to severe toilet clogs, what’s important to note for poor toilet performance is recurrence. If stubborn, performance limiting toilet clogs are a normal problem in your home, it’s quite possible that snaking or correct plunging practices won’t resolve the issue. In these cases, the problem likely has more to do with significant drainpipe damage than it does flushed debris.

When a Toilet Clog is More Than a Toilet Clog

If clogging is or has been a persistent problem in your home, there’s a good chance the problem is not your toilet, specifically, but rather your drain pipes. Persistent, stubborn toilet clogs are common indicators of the following plumbing problems, which can quickly turn into emergencies if left untreated:

• Sever blockage downstream in your pipes
• Pipe collapse somewhere in your drain system
• Possible intrusion
• Leaking or faulty installation, which are detrimental to downstream water pressure

Dealing with problems such as these doesn’t have to be as expensive as you might think. Drain cleaning experts in your area, equipped with the right tools and years of experience in toilet pipe repair, can resolve issues like these with ease, with techniques to save you money and time.

The go-to Sacramento pipe repair experts are the skilled technicians at Express Sewer & Drain, who can use advanced video inspection tools, renovation tools and techniques to return your toilet performance to normal for good.

If you believe recurring toilet clogs in your home may be due to more severe problems, do not hesitate to contact us. We can provide affordable, thorough solutions for your home plumbing repair needs, and help stop your minor issues with your toilet pipe from turning into major plumbing catastrophes.