Intermittent Toilet Bubble/Slow Flush

Hi Everyone;

We have a 30 yr old house with 2 identical older American Standard toilets - one in the basement, and one in the loft. The one in the loft acts up about every tenth flush, wherein it does the slow flush. We also get a bubble instantly when we flush, and we then know it will not succeed. It does this a couple of times, then is OK for another ten times or so. All other sinks and tubs, and the basement toilet, work fine.

Using info from searching the forums here (awesome site! I love what you can find online) I have cleaned out the jet hole (it seemed OK) and all the rim holes (dirty), but this issue still occurs.

Water level is right up to the edge of the overflow in the tank.
I think the vent and the rest of the system is OK if everything else works fine.
We have no children so there should not be any GI Joes or anything stuck in the trap.

I am kind of at a loss of what to do at the moment. It has always been this way, ever since we bought the house. Last year we were doing reno's and had the ceiling below the upstairs toilet ripped apart, and found the drain actually ran uphill about 2 inches and there were 2 old screws actually through the ABS drain pipe! We removed the entire section of plumbing and redid it with a proper slope, and everything seemed great - long enough for us to assume the problem had left permanently - but three weeks after putting everything back together the problem returned. There were no other obstructions between this point and where the drain tapped into the vent line.

I'm tempted to buy a couple new wax gaskets and flip the two toilets around to see if the problem follows the toilet or stays with the location.

Thanks in advance for any ideas or tips you may have,

Rick

Sounds like a vent problem, partial obstruction in the drain.

It might be worth having a plumber run a snake from the top of the vent pipe out to the street sewer to make sure everything is clear. I'd make sure this is done for all the vent stacks if you have more than one just to rule out all possiblities.

You may not notice the problem with sink or tub drains since these aren't dumping 3 gallons+ of water all at once.

Thanks for the quick reply. I forgot to mention we are on a septic system. The basement toilet works fine, so I was thinking the vent may be OK, unless the basement toilet being at the end of the chain so to speak makes a vent issue less noticeable (not a clue). I also wondered about a blockage before, because even though the sinks and tub drain fine, since they always drain slower than a toilet flushes I didn't know if that was a good test or not. I'll keep an eye on it.

Doing some further investigating today (since the weather outside is crap) I read about pouring a bucket of water in the toilet while flushing. I tried that and it worked, the toilet flushed fine. But it could be because I am at the "good for 10 flushes" part of the cycle.

Thanks,

Rick

I see this quite often with older toilets. The orifices around the bowl of the toilet clog up and don't let the water rush in like it should. So the bowl fills up slower and takes longer to flush. This cause loss of siphonic action through the S trap in the toilet and as a result you get a toilet that doesn't flush well at all.

Poor a bunch of buckets down there at once and if 5/5 they go down smooth I would say it's time for a new toilet. You might be able to fix the toilet by putting some CLR into tank, mixing it and flushing the toilet. MAKE SURE YOU READ THE LABEL AND IT"S OK TO USE ON PORCELAIN! I have not ever done this because when ever I run into this problem I try and sell the customer a new toilet

Best of luck!

We had actually been thinking about a new toilet, but I have heard (and seen) so many horror stories about low flush toilets (plus we draw from a lake) that we are hesitant to change if we don't have to. I will look at the CLR trick.

Ever since I poured the bucket of water down, my wife has said it is flushing OK, but it could be where we are in the "cycle"

Thanks,

Rick

Ricketts said:

We had actually been thinking about a new toilet, but I have heard (and seen) so many horror stories about low flush toilets (plus we draw from a lake) that we are hesitant to change if we don't have to.

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Rick, if I was still on septic I would be even more inclined to go to a low flush toilet (and front loading washer.) The amount of solids shouldn't change, but why add a lot of extra liquid volume? Extra water just makes it more likely to have field line back up and it makes venting more difficult (more entrained air from the longer flush, plus several times the liquid volume.) Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I have vivid memories of a friend's septic overflowing every time he had a lake party...cutting out 2 gpf or more would have been a huge help.

I would rather have a well designed low flush toilet than any of the old high volume toilets.

It sounds like something in the trapway of the toilet.

The new toilets will out flush that old thing that you have been struggling with.

I can't believe that you think it's worth saving?
We throw out a dozen toilets like yours a week.