Seeing the water in your toilet bowl slowly rise higher and higher is enough to make your heart stop. An overflowing toilet is every homeowner’s worse nightmare. It’s a mess to clean up and a gross situation overall to be dealing with by yourself. Plus, fixing the toilet is only half of the job. You also have to worry about the clean up after!
It’s important to be clear on all the measures you have to take when you’re struggling with an overflowing toilet and how to properly clean up the leftover mess. If you find the job becoming too difficult to manage alone, hiring a professional plumbing company is always a smart move.
True Plumbers & AC offers 24/7 emergency plumbing services for residential and commercial properties in central Florida, including Lakeland, Plant City, and Winter Haven.
What should you do first when your toilet starts overflowing?
You go to flush the toilet and notice it’s not going down, what do you do?! While your first instinct may be to panic, being proactive is the best way to minimize some of the cleanup you’ll be doing later on. If your toilet starts overflowing:
1. Turn off the water supply. Shutting off the water supply line can stop the overflow situation from getting much worse. Most toilets will have a shut-off valve near the base of the toilet. If you can’t find the valve or it is seized, remove the tank lid and lift the float high enough to stop the fill valve from running, then hold or prop it there.
2. Do NOT try flushing your toilet repeatedly. As much as you might want to, it’s never a good idea to flush again after the first problem. You could end up making the situation much worse. An overflowing toilet can be caused for a number of reasons. You may be dealing with a clogged drain line, a main sewer backup, or on a property with septic, a failing drain field. If water also rises in the tub or shower when you flush, the blockage is past the toilet, and that pattern is covered in what it means when water backs up into the bathtub.
If your toilet keeps overflowing, call True Plumbers & AC immediately! Our team will arrive as quickly as they can to help fix the problem.
How can you unclog your toilet?
You’ve stopped the water flow! Now it’s time for the not so fun part: trying to unclog your toilet.
If you want to attempt to unclog the toilet yourself, it’s important to have the right tools and supplies. Some things you’ll need include:
- Drain snake or auger
- Plunger
- Bucket and mop
- Towels or rags
- Gloves
- Bleach
Be sure to put on gloves first before working with an overflowing toilet. It’s also a good idea to put some towels around your toilet in case any water spills over.
Next, go in with the plunger, particularly one with a flange at the end of it. The rubber cup forms a tight seal around the hole in the toilet bowl and makes it easier to loosen the clog. We also recommend trying to scoop out some of the water if you can. This may not be a very appealing approach, but it will help keep the water from sloshing around too much while you’re using the plunger.
Don’t want to deal with scooping up the black water? Let our team at True Plumbers & AC handle it for you! Call (863) 667-6364 for help.
If the plunger doesn’t work, you can try using a drain snake next. A toilet auger, also known as a drain snake, is a long flexible shaft that can be inserted into your toilet bowl and maneuvered around to try and break up the clog. If you have neither tool on hand, there are other ways to unclog a toilet without a plunger.
What you should not do is pour in a chemical drain opener. It will not reach the clog, it can crack a porcelain bowl, and it will splash caustic liquid at whoever opens the trap next. We cover that in why store bought drain cleaners are a bad idea.
Cleaning up toilet overflow: why is it so important?
Cleaning up the aftermath from an overflowing toilet is not a fun activity, but you’ll want to get started as soon as possible. Black water contains raw sewage and a wide range of bacteria and viruses that can cause typhoid, hepatitis, and cholera. Gloves and diluted bleach are enough for a few splashes on the floor, but it’s a different story if there’s more black water than that. Our explainer on clear water, gray water, and black water covers why that distinction changes the cleanup.
Never mix bleach with ammonia or with any other cleaning product, and open a window while you work.
The longer the water is allowed to sit there, the more damage it can do. You’ll want to make sure that all the areas in your bathroom are free of moisture and that all the black water has been properly cleaned up. If any of it soaks into your floorboards, drywall, or bathroom cabinets, it’s very likely that all these items will need replacing to ensure no mildew growth begins to form. Once sewage is in the building materials, it is a water damage restoration job, not a mop job.
Don’t want to deal with the aftermath of a toilet overflow? No problem! Remedying this situation is our specialty!
No one wants to deal with a clogged toilet, but it will most likely happen to you at some point. Knowing what to do when your toilet overflows is what keeps it from becoming a floor replacement.
Most of it is preventable. Wipes cause more overflows than anything else, and flushable wipes are not really flushable, which is why they top our list of things you should never flush. If your toilet fills to the rim before it drains, without ever quite spilling, read when I flush my toilet it fills up with water. Instead of getting stuck with the problem yourself, you can hire our team at True Plumbers & AC to handle the mess for you. We handle toilet repair and sewage system repairs and will clean up what’s left behind from the overflow. Our crew is fully licensed and insured, and every team member is trained to use professional tools so the job is fixed the first time.
Call today at (863) 667-6364. We’re available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for residential and commercial properties across central Florida.
