One good, one bad....

In my house I have back to back bathrooms (different rooms) and while one flushes perfectly, the other is very slow. I assume that because of the way the house is built, with the same vent servicing both rooms, the problem isn't there (the vent).
I have tried snaking the offending WC and made sure the small holes under the rim are clear.

What's next? Do I need to pull the toilet?


Thanks for any help,

The problem is most likely in that toilet trap or the closet bend to the commom stack.
I would pull the toilet to see if there isn't a small piece of plastic (toy, toothbrush, etc.) or something else wedged in and partially plugging things. Sometimes a toilet auger just won't dislodge things from the bowl side.
Good Luck!
Mike

Has it been slow for a long time? What does slow mean? Not sure what you mean by snaked out the toilet. Usually when a toilet has an object in it, when you put an ordinary amount of paper in it it will plug right up. That is the best to prove that an object is in the trap. Thats when you use a good closet auger. Use the paper test till you get the object out.

It's been slow as long as I have owned the house (1 1/2 years). Don't know the history before that. The reason I waited as long as I have is that there were other parts of the house that needed more immediate attention.

By "slow" I mean that it takes 2 or 3 times as long to flush as the other toilet, which is on a common vent pipe.
The toilet doesn't back up and everything eventually flushes down, it's just the difference between the two toilets that have me wondering.

I thought that maybe something was plugging the line so I used a closet auger to try and clear it out. It was met with the usual resistance going around the curves but then went all the way in. I did that a few times but it made no difference.

I recently installed a new compression angle stop valve and replaced the mechanical guts with a new unit from Flowmaster.

glad I'm not the only one...

we have the same problem... and have had for 20 years... one good flusher (a first timer every time) and the other a very slow flusher...

I've taken the offending flusher apart... have never found any toys or plastic etc. in it... last year we remodelled the offending toilet's bathroom in hopes of appeasing the toilet gods... but no luck... during reno, we checked out the main outlet... didn't seem to be any problems... so this week we're installing a new toto Ultimate in our own bathroom and moving the old, but flushable Crane into the offenders spot... at least that way we'll find out if its the base or the outlet run... the tank mechanism was fine cuz it now resides on a third toilet downstairs and flushes very well thank you... except that its closed down temporarily due to a wee leak at the water input joint (not much for proper technical jargon here... sorry)

wo whats the difference in a snake and a closet auger?

A snake is most times in a drum and can be 10, 15, 25, 50' long. It can make a mess of the toilet by leaving marks on the porcelain.

A closet auger is a heavy piece of snake up to 6' long in a protective casing curved at the bottom that you place in the toilet and it feeds the snake into and through the toilet by pushing and turning a handle. The protective cover prevents the snake from leaving any marks on the porcelain.

dkpbxman said:

By "slow" I mean that it takes 2 or 3 times as long to flush as the other toilet, which is on a common vent pipe ... it's just the difference between the two toilets that have me wondering.

Click to expand...

I had a toilet doing essentially the same thing in this single-bath house my wife and I had just bought. Since there was *no* vent anywhere in *any* of the plumbing in this house, I was first quite sure the addition of a vent close to the toilet would solve its slow-and-occasionally-imcomplete-flush problem ... but the addition of a vent changed nothing. Next, I pulled the toilet from the floor and removed the tank and spent several hours using various means to remove all scale and so on from its trap and flush ring ... and once again, nothing changed. Finally, we replaced the toilet with a used-but-otherwise-expensive freebie from a friend and discovered that all we had ever needed was a toilet capable of flushing properly in the first place. Maybe you have the same kind of situation there ...

When I bought my home 20 years ago, it came with two identical toilets. One gave what I would call a marginal performance (was later replaced about a year later), and the other one in the main bath upstairs was unacceptable. It was slow, sometimes the water just swirled and wouldn't go down, and twice it overflowed. Curiously enough, one of these identical units in my neighbor's condo flushed perfectly, while most my neighbors had the "marginal" flush.

The builder refused to fix the problem, so I installed a new toilet which performed very well (I should have kept it, but I switched to one of the first generation 1.6 gallon toilets when having my floor tiled, and lived to regret it -- that problem after many years has been solved).

Later on, the plumbing company who installed the original toilets admitted that there had been some "bad castings" in the group of "contractor specials" that they had used.

Maybe what you have is a bad casting, which I would guess would have performed badly since day one.

Good luck solving your problem.

achutch