I love plumbing questions. I enjoy being tested when it comes to my plumbing knowledge. Some questions are easy to answer. Other stump me, so I usually ring my dad. Often it’s to get reassurance that what I’m going to reply with is the right solution. I’ve had some funny questions over the years and I’ve had some serious ones that have required me to do a bit of digging.
One common question that would perplex me was the question of ‘Help! I flushed this down the toilet and I’m not sure if I need to ring a plumber to retrieve it?’
Sometimes it would be a child flushing a pear down the toilet, other times it would be adults saying they flushed anything from a brush to a hair clip down the toilet.
I would wonder why and how? How could you flush a brush down the toilet? What would possess you to drop a brush down the toilet and flush it without retrieving it?
It wasn’t until I had my own ‘near flush’ experience that I realized how easy it is to reach for the button before retrieving said item.
When I was on holiday with the kids at Turtle Beach Resort, our ensuite was quite long and narrow. The toilet was next to the vanity basin.
As I was removing my gator clip from my hair to straighten my curly locks, the unthinkable happened. The clip sprung out of my clasp and landed perfectly in the toilet bowl. Splash
Great! Esther had used our toilet and she is a fan of the if it’s yellow let it mellow movement.
Thankfully she had flushed that afternoon and the water was semi-reasonable.
Without even thinking I went to press the button to ‘wash’ my precious gator clip down the Turtle Beach Resort sewer.
Thank goodness I stopped myself. But I had to eat humble pie and I realized how easy it was to ‘accidentally’ flush before I fished.
Queensland Urban Utilties (QUU) are warning residents not to flush the wrong things down their sinks, pipes and toilets. It can not only cause an expensive plumbing bill if said item gets caught down the line, it adds extra work at the sewage treatment plant. QUU spend $600,000 each year disposing of this rubbish from the sewerage treatment plant. Only three P’s should be flushed down toilets – Pee, Poo and Paper.
If you use flushable wipes, use them, but dispose of them in the bin and not down your toilet. I like the convenience of a cleaning wipe but I know not to send them swimming down my sewer as ultimately they will clog my sewer. Wipes are adding to the work QUU do when treating our sewage. They remove 120 tonnes of wet wipes from their sewage network. That’s a lot of wipes. And that’s a lot of extra expense that someone has to pay for…
So my advice is fish before you flush. Don’t flush anything foreign down the toilet, unless of course it’s the Indian food you scoffed down the night before. 😉
Last week on Home Improvement Thursday we had two blogs link up. It was a busy week with Nicole and Nikki preparing for the Love Your Home event, which I shared about earlier this week. Erin from Seven Little Australians and Counting linked up to share the progress of renovating their home and the arrival of their roof materials. If you want to follow a blog that shares the highs and lows of building and renovating, Erin’s blog is one you should follow. Best of all they are getting the family in to help with the build.
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