Blocked Toilets, Taps & Bathrooms
The everyday failures, running toilets, weak showers, dripping taps, fixed properly.
A blocked toilet: what to do in the first two minutes
Do not flush again. A second flush on a blocked pan is what turns a contained problem into a bathroom floor you have to disinfect. Take the lid off the cistern and lift the float to stop it refilling if it is already running. Then work out whether the water level is dropping slowly, which means a partial blockage you can probably clear, or not at all, which means it is solid.
Clearing it without a plunger
A bucket of warm water, not boiling, poured from waist height often carries a soft blockage through on its own, the force of the fall does the work. Washing-up liquid left for twenty minutes first helps if the obstruction is greasy or paper. A toilet plunger with a flange, sealed properly against the outlet, handles most of the rest. A sink plunger will not seal a toilet.
Why it blocked, and whether it will again
Wipes are the single biggest cause and they do not disintegrate whatever the packet claims. After that: too much paper at once in a low-flush pan, sanitary products, and a weak flush that never had enough force to clear the trap properly. If the same toilet blocks repeatedly, the flush volume or the fall to the soil stack is worth checking rather than blaming whoever used it.
When the blockage is not in the toilet
If the bath and the shower are also slow, or the toilet bubbles when another fixture drains, the toilet is fine and the blockage is in the soil stack or the underground run. Working on the pan will achieve nothing. That is a drainage job, and knowing the difference before anyone starts saves both a wasted visit and a wasted fee.
The everyday bathroom failures worth fixing early
A running toilet wastes several hundred litres a day and is a cheap part. A dripping tap that is ignored becomes a seized spindle and then a whole tap. A shower that has lost pressure is usually a scaled cartridge, not a dying pump. In each case the small job now is a fraction of the big job later, which is unglamorous advice and completely true.
The three toilet failures behind 90% of callouts, and which ones are genuinely DIY.
Gravity, combi or unvented, the fix is completely different depending on what you have.
Trap, waste, tap base or supply: finding which of the four is actually leaking.
The plumbing details that decide whether a new kitchen works quietly for a decade.
What is actually inside your cistern, and which part to blame for each misbehaviour.
A weak or partial flush is nearly always the cistern mechanism or blocked rim jets, rarely the toilet itself.
How do I unblock a toilet without a plunger?
Why does my toilet keep blocking?
Should I use chemical drain unblocker in a toilet?
My toilet is blocked and it is the only one in the flat.
Water where it
shouldn't be? Call.
A person answers, not a menu. You'll have an arrival time and a price range before you hang up.
020 3674 8514Or WhatsApp 07865 292684, photos help us bring the right parts
