Toilet Training and a Blocked Toilet, Two of the Joys of Parenthood!

Being a parent has so many responsibilities. You are the one that has to teach your child how to do everything, and toilet training is one of the most important!

Of course, part of this is teaching your inquisitive child that the toilet shouldn’t be used as a rubbish receptacle for any unwanted item. One thing we find quite regularly in blocked, overflowing toilets are nappies that apparently are a lot of fun to flush!

I’m not sure why small children are so fascinated with an ordinary, everyday toilet, but judging by the number of times we are called out to fix a blocked toilet, only to find that a child’s toy is the culprit is quite remarkable.

Maybe it’s the ‘disappearance’ factor?
Drop it in, flush, and hey presto… gone!
Until the poor plumber has to come and fish it out!

We can have a laugh about it, but having a blocked toilet can cause immense discomfort and embarrassing problems, especially if you are a one toilet family! Hopefully you know your neighbours well enough to request a ‘pit stop’.

Toilet blockages can be avoided simply by making sure that the only two things that should be flushed down a toilet are toilet paper and human waste.

Unfortunately, people seem to think that wet wipes, paper towels, feminine products, cotton balls, cotton swabs, facial scrub pads and other items can also be flushed away, out of sight, out of mind.

Not so, as paper towels can take more than 24 hours to dissolve, and feminine hygiene products and other items can take days, weeks, months or longer and can cause sewage back-ups into your home.

Some wet wipes can be so harmful that they’ve been known to clog not just residential systems, but industrial-grade pumps at water treatment plants! Before you flush any wet wipes, read the label and see if it is flushable. If it doesn’t say that it is… don’t flush it!

Another handy tip is to close your toilet lid if you have a shelf above or beside your toilet. This will ensure that items are not accidentally knocked off the shelf into the toilet and will make it more difficult for small children to enjoy trying to flush their toys.

So, you have done all you can to avoid the inevitable, but here it is….

Your toilet bowl is full of heaven only knows what, it smells worse than a boys locker room after a game, and you don’t know what to do.

We recommend that you don’t try to fix it yourself. An incorrectly plunged toilet can flood your entire house, and it won’t be pretty.

The first step towards unblocking your toilet is to stop panicking.

The second step is to call M.J. Walker Plumbing Gold Coast, and then sit back and relax while we do all the work.

Everything we need to get the job done is in our Van, so we can get to work straight away. We can remove your toilet pan and clean the blockage, re installing your toilet back to the way it was before the blockage.

Happy days are here again!
Oh, and good luck with the toilet training!