Toilet not draining, venting problem??
House was built in 1996 and at the time had a toilet and sink rough in installed in basement. Just last month had basement finished and bathroom put in. Sink drains great, Toilet not so much. there is a vent stack right behind the sink, which cant be 3 ft from the toilet. Taking the toilet off the drain line is not pluged and water does drain down it. Nothing is in the toilet.
Any ideas on what to do? This is really upsetting.
Replies
>>>Taking the toilet off the
>>>Taking the toilet off the drain line is not pluged and water does drain down it. Nothing is in the toilet.
I don't understand these sentences. Are you saying the toilet is not vented?
Plugged
If you pulled the toilet and water does not drain down the waste pipe it is plugged. Even a stooped up vent will not totally stop a waste line from draining. Like up ending a milk jug full of water the waste line will suck enough air by gulping (like the milk jug, to eventually drain. The sink may be draining because it wyes into the waste line further down stram than the stoppage that is blocking the toilet.
Have you tried a drain snake?
I would rent a large sewer line snake (3/4 or 1") and run it through the closet flang and down the waste line. Or call someone like Roto Rooter to snake it out for you if you are not familiar with operating a large draine snake.
My guess is that something is plugged somewhere. The toilet, if new, may be defective. Or something (eg, a comb) may have been dropped in it. There may be some obstruction in the line.
Lack of a vent line can cause some funky behavior, but will not prevent draining generally.
If you don't find something I'd suggest getting a plumber to run a camera down the drain.
Here is drawing of what Im talking about. The Toilet is 4ft from the vent stack. which is shown as a dotted line through the vanity.
The length of the vent and the number of (dry) elbows is largely irrelevant. And 2" (ID) should be sufficient.
A 4-foot horizontal run of the vent below the floor may be a problem, if that is indeed what you have. If the horizontal run of the vent is in the wall behind the toilet then no problem.
I still think something's plugged.
Take the toilet out in the yard, set it up on a couple of 2x4s, fill the tank and bowl from a hose, and flush it. It should empty in a snap.
Pour a 2-gallon bucket of water down the drain as rapidly as possible. It should not back up.
Before you finished this bath, was the wall behind the toilet covered? Do you know if there is a vent connection rising up right behind the toilet and running over to the vent pipe behind the vanity?
Before it was finished there was only one stack, it was right were the vanity is. You could not see any pipes running from the toilet to the vanity stack. The only thing running to the toilet flange is the drain under the concrete.
I just ran a snake in the drain line and it found nothing. I took the toilet off and poured water down the hole as fast as I could. It all drained away. But I know that I could not pour it nearly as fast as the toilet puts water in the line.
Lack of proper venting is almost certainly NOT the reason for poor flushing. The drain line for the toilet will have access to vent air somewhere down the line so that the air that is pushed ahead of a slug of water from the toilet will have a way to escape; the only thing to prevent that air escaping would be if the downstream line were full due to a large flow of drain water from some other part of the house, but your testing will not have been done under those conditions, right?
If you do the flush test of the toilet that DanH suggested, you may find that there is indeed something you can't see that is restricting the flush.
If the toilet checks out, it is my guess that there's an air lock in the drain line. This can happen if there's a belly in the drain line that holds a full pipe of water, together with
a backward slope on the vent that's supposed to serve the toilet (the one that also drains the vanity--it's called a "wet vent" in that situation because the vent that serves the toilet is also draining the vanity sink.)
In the situation I'm trying to describe, the air lock is created because the drain line and the wet vent are both holding a full pipe of water all the time and when you flush the toilet, its slug of water tries to push air ahead of itself, but can't because of the bellied water in the drain and the vent.
I have seen this happen when the pipes involved settled too much after they were laid. It's rare, and probably not the cause of your problem, but if no other answer explains what's happening, have the line camera'd to see if the drain is holding water.
"Before it was finished there was only one stack, it was right were the vanity is. You could not see any pipes running from the toilet to the vanity stack. The only thing running to the toilet flange is the drain under the concrete"
This is normal--the connections are under the floor..
There SHOULD BE a vent pipe rising up behind the toilet. It could be capped off, but should have been left so that it could be connected when the toilet was installed.
But even lacking that, I doubt that venting is the issue here.
Plumber came and fixed the "problem", All he did was pour lots of water down the drain line and then flush the toilet many times. At first he ran a snake down the line and dident come up with anything. His conconclusion was that it was just some old sewage residue that was in the pipe that was restricting the flow of water. Nothing was pluging it, but shes better now.
That makes sense due to the fact that the drains for the basement bath had never been used. It can happen that the wye branch that was intended to receive the discharge from the basement bath becomes partially plugged by sewage sloshing into it without ever being washed out.
They have Dollar taco Night on Thursdays at a local Pub here. Thats a really good way to stress test it if you can find one in your area.