Class Five toilet not always flushing right...
A few months ago, we installed two new Kohler class-five toilets. They took the place of two low-water toilets we'd installed in the early 90s. The new install was partly because one of the old ones was loose, that the underlying flange was possibly broken, and the two hadn't really performed all that well anyway.
We brought in a plumber to install the two new toilets (my folks are getting old, and
I'm no handyman), and so far as I understand it, the plumber didn't notice any obvious damage to the flange under the front-bathroom toilet, and just went ahead and installed the new toilet.
We have the old style cast-iron sewage pipes in this house (this house was built in the 60s or so, or maybe the 50s...) so the low-water toilets weren't really suited for this house anyway. Or so the lady in the plumbing department at Lowes seemed to think. But, then, those early water-saver toilets were a joke, anyway.
In any event, the new toilets are the kind that are advertised as being totally clog proof... the ones from the TV spot where the guy frantically dumps everything in sight into the toilet trying to clog it up so he has an excuse to call in the lady plumber working next door...
Well, sometimes the new toilet doesn't seem to flush quite right. I flush it, and the poop doesn't entirely leave the bowl. The toilet doesn't seem to complete the whole flush. Other times it works perfectly. I've gotten into the habit of holding down the lever until it completes the flush, though, because sometimes it seems to only
start to flush, but then stop immediately.... like it takes only the first second or so of the flush action and then stops in its tracks, as if I hadn't pressed the lever all the way.
Yesterday, I went to flush it, and it instead drained the bowl... very slowly, and the poop and TP didn't move one iota, except to be lowered down onto the now-dry base of the bowl! I waited for the tank to fill, watched as the bowl slowly filled back up to about its normal level, and then I flushed it again... to the same result. This happened several times in succession before I finally gave up on it, and went to take a shower.
Some while later, I came back to it and found that the water had largely drained out of the bowl, this time on its own... and I flushed it again. This time it immediately filled the bowl, and the poop went nowhere. And the water level came to higher than it usually sits, and remained there. I grabbed a plunger and started plunging it... which sometimes helps after LOTS of pushing, but is probably futile. Incredibly, after a moment of this, the water level seemed to be slowly
rising! In fact, after I simply stopped plunging, it ever so slowly rose to the top of the bowl... and then slowly started overflowing it.
Now, I'd earlier brought the issue of the not-quite-flushing problem up with the lady at Lowes (who strikes me very much as an expert in these matters), who tells me that there's simply no way it could be the toilet at fault, and that there has to be something messed up further down the pipe from it. She thinks either that a major root has gotten into that section of our sewage pipe, or that there's a problem with the venting pipe (or whatever its called) that typically goes up to an opening in the roof -- say, that some animal crawled in it and died -- but that it cannot possibly be a problem with the toilet itself...
I'm not really all that good at relaying that info to my folks, though... I've probably done a better job of it here than I did to them... and anyway they don't seem to have been listening, either.
I brought it up again yesterday, during the overflow problem, but Mom just thinks that's all nonsense, and insists the problem is PURELY that I'm using too much toilet paper, and even this time went so far as claiming that I was
folding it wrong!
I keep remembering this thing I saw on History Channel about "bathroom tech," where they showed all the work they put into making sure these new class five toilets will flush anything you dump into them, trying every possible thing they
could to clog them up -- filling them with a gazillion golf balls, filling them up with abnormally large piles of simulated, solid poop, and so on, and then flushing it -- to satisfy themselves that the design they'd developed was worth shipping.... and anyway, there was a poster (for a different brand of class-five toilet) in the toilet aisle at Lowes showing a little boy standing there
almost buried in toilet paper, with words to the effect that there's no need to be concerned about the toilet not flushing...
So no, I don't buy for a second the notion that the answer here is being
really really careful with the toilet paper!
Oh yeah, and apparently also there's been some kind of "leak problem" the last couple of weeks. I gather the tank mechanism sometimes, intermittently, keeps on filling the tank and they have to pop open the top and stop it. Apparently it just fills the tank to capacity... and keeps on going, letting the water keep going down the overflow. I hadn't ever noticed it doing that myself, but I'm not usually where I can hear it, as it happens, and they hadn't volunteered the fact to me either, I guess they just assumed I'd noticed it as well.
And a couple of times this last week, I'd come into the bathroom to find that the toilet rug was sopping wet, and been pushed off to the side. Dunno if that has anything to do with the leak they were talking about above, thought I
do notice they've freshly caulked all around the base of the toilet lately...
Is there something online somewhere I can point my folks to that shows, visually,
how it's possible that it
could be a problem with the pipes down past the toilet? Something with detailed diagrams and stuff? They don't want to spend the money bringing in a plumber with one of those pipe-camera things, because they figure the pipe-camera thing would be really expensive to bring in, but it's the only way I could imagine it being possible to prove, or rule out, that the problem is a big, fat, tree-root messing things up down there...