Clogged toilets are among the most common plumbing problems in Lexington, KY. After all, people use and flush these fixtures multiple times each day. Large stools, excess toilet paper, and non-degradable items can overwhelm toilets, overflow their bowls, and send effluence spilling onto floors. While dumping a low-cost, store-bought drain cleaner into your toilet might seem like the easiest solution, it could cause far more harm than good. Read on to find out why you should never use a drain cleaner to fix a toilet clog.
Toilet Clogs Are Usually Dense, Heavy Waste
The primary intended use for chemical drain cleaners is to break down buildups of soap scum, hair, grease, and biofilms in sinks, bathtub drains, shower pans, or laundry basins. If you have sluggish, slow-moving drains, a caustic or corrosive drain cleaner can open your drain pipes by dissolving trapped waste in their interiors.
However, even in clogged shower pans, sinks, and tubs, store-bought drain cleaners have a hard time breaking down thicker, heavier deposits. When you dump these products into toilets, they’ll have little impact on dense stools and wet clumps of toilet paper.
Drain Cleaners Are Inherently Dangerous
With a tough toilet clog, a chemical drain cleaner won’t save the day. Worse still, it will leave you with a toilet bowl filled with contaminated water. When you add a drain cleaner to the waste in a clogged toilet, plunging and the potential for splash-back become dangerous.
Whether caustic or corrosive, drain cleaners can cause serious eye and skin damage following direct contact. This remains true even after these products are diluted with stagnant toilet water. Keep in mind that adding chemical contaminants to trapped toilet waste makes plunging unnecessarily dangerous for plumbers, too.
Chemical drain cleaners undergo rapid and intense chemical reactions as soon as consumers add them to water. With corrosive drain cleaners, this reaction “eats through” organic materials. Caustic drain cleaners break down grease, hair, and other matter by generating heat. Unfortunately, both drain cleaner types work indiscriminately. They’ll dissolve organic materials whether they land in your toilet bowl or your eye.
In addition to potential skin and eye injuries, drain cleaners can cause respiratory distress, difficulty breathing, and chemical burns in the mouth, throat, and lungs. You can minimize the risk of these injuries by using these products in well-ventilated spaces. However, having a drain cleaner trapped in your toilet bowl increases the risk of physical harm from noxious fumes.
Adding drain cleaners to slow-moving drains poses a limited risk of splash-back. Adding a drain cleaner to a full toilet does not.
Drain Cleaners Wreak Havoc on Pipes and Void Warranties
The fact that drain cleaners indiscriminately dissolve organic materials puts your pipes at risk as well. Having drain cleaners trapped in your plumbing system could result in accelerated pipe wear, pipe leaks, and lost manufacturer warranties.
How Should You Solve Your Toilet Clog?
Every homeowner in Savannah should have a high-quality plunger on hand. If you know that your toilet clog is the result of using too much toilet paper or flushing a larger-than-average stool, you can try plunging the blockage down. Plungers completely cover the outlet holes in toilets and force waste into plumbing systems.
However, if there’s even a slight chance that someone in your household has flushed a comb, toothbrush, toy, or other non-degradable item, you should call a plumber right away. Plunging a solid, non-degradable item will force it deeper into your pipes and complicate the repair process. To protect your sewer line, the best resolution for blockages like these is often extraction.
For excess toilet paper and larger-than-average tools, you can also try filling the toilet bowl with warm water. Warm water can accelerate the breakdown of soft organic matter and make it easier to flush. Avoid using boiling water as it could crack your toilet bowl.
If these simple troubleshooting measures don’t work, contact a licensed plumber. Plumbers have many safe and effective clog removal tools at their disposal. They also have non-invasive diagnostic equipment for identifying potentially serious obstructions.
We’ve been successfully unclogging toilets in Lexington and the surrounding communities since 2017. We offer expert plumbing services and 24/7 emergency plumbing repairs. As the 2024 winner of the Angi Super Service Award, we’re committed to providing upfront pricing, excellent workmanship, and consistently outstanding customer service. If you have a clogged toilet in Lexington, give Pipe Surgeon Plumbing a call!
