To avoid unwanted plumbing expenses, there are certain things you should never flush down your toilet. Here are more than 10 harmful things for the toilet that you must know.
1. Baby Wipes and Diapers
When it comes to baby wipes and diapers, you should always avoid flushing them down the toilet. Both of these products are not water-soluble and don’t break down after flushing. Flushing these products can destroy your septic and continue to destroy the environment.
2 . Waste Food
As you know, we use toilets to dispose of food we already digested and not the other way around. As we chew, our stomach acid breaks down food. And the bacteria in our stomach does a fine job of completing the process.
Food that has not gone through the complicated process doesn’t break down when flushed and can take a long time to break down. Food can clog pipes and wreak havoc on your septic. Plus, doing so can clog your sewer line and back raw sewage right into your home.
3. Harmful Chemicals
As you use bleach or other harmful chemicals for cleaning our bathrooms, it might seem counterintuitive to say not to flush down your toilet these products. However, there are strong and corrosive bleaches that can damage your pipes. They can also be too harsh for a septic system.
4. Your Hair
After cleaning your bathroom drains, hairballs can wreak havoc and cause massive backups. Therefore, it’s imperative not to throw hair down the toilet. Hair doesn’t dissolve, and if it did, we would go bald after bathing or swimming. It makes sense to never dispose of hair and flush it down the toilet.
Instead, after cleaning out hair from your drains, place it right into the trash. This way, you will prevent clogs and the need for plumbing services.
5. Sanitary Pads
Sanitary products absorb water like a magnet and can create a clog as soon as you flush.
6. Cooking Grease
It might seem, people do flush oil down their toilets. After cooking, we end up with excess cooking oil. As some don’t want to wash it down the kitchen drain, some do flush it down the toilet. Oil and grease will solidify when they cool and can become rock-hard, causing clogs and even breaking pipes as they solidify.
Instead, when you have your cooking grease ready, dump it in the garbage on top of some paper towels. Or, after your grease cools down, place it in a recyclable container, and when ready, you can safely throw it away.
7. Rubber And Plastics Products
We thought nothing about flushing items like condoms, dental floss, band-aids, and gum right down the drain in the past. Moreover, these items don’t break down and will cause clogs. Try never to flush down the bowl anything that looks like it might not break down and cause trouble.
Always place a lovely wastepaper basket in your bathrooms and remind everyone to use it when disposing of it. Placing a wastepaper basket will stand as a reminder not to flush things down the bowl too. More so, get one with a lid that is far more hygienic also.
8. Medicine
Some medicines do not break down fast or adequately enough in water alone and can cause blockages and clogging. More so if you dump an entire bottle down at once.
However, the core reason to not flush medication down the toilet is that these potent substances make their way through the sanitation process and into the drinking water supply.
9. Makeup Wipes And Cotton Rounds
Everyone loves makeup wipes, and much like sanitary wipes, you never flush them down the toilet. That also holds for cotton rounds as well. Even though these products seem small and soft enough to flush, they aren’t and will clog your toilet.
10. Cigarette Butts
Ask anyone who flushed a cigarette butt about how resistantly they refuse to flush down the bowl. But with some persistence, these butts can and do flush. Doing so can create damage to our water system and harm wildlife as well.
11. Fish
It seems pretty standard that people flush pet fish when they die, but this is actually not a good idea. Fishes don’t break down in the water, so flushing them or anything like it down the toilet can absolutely cause a clog. Stick to a proper burial instead.
To keep your toilet safe, you must avoid all these things. Always keep our environment in mind when disposing of anything in your home.
