How to Stop an Overflowing Toilet

Stopping an overflowing toilet is quite an emergency. It requires quick thinking and fast actions. If you know from your experience on how to deal with it, you may be lucky, but if not, until the time you get to useful tips on Google, you may find your bathroom flooded with unsanitary water!

One of the first steps of stopping an overflow is to prevent more water from entering the toilet bowl. For this, immediately remove the toilet water tank lid and put it aside. Now reach your hand inside the toilet tank and firmly press down on the flapper valve. Don’t worry about the water as it is sanitary. The flapper valve is a small rubber piece situated at the bottom center of the tank. Once the flap is closed, water will stop from entering the toilet bowl. For now, this will ensure that no more water is flowing in the toilet bowl and overflowing from its sides. After securing the flapper valve, you need to stop the toilet tank from filling up more water. For this, lift up on the float that operates the tank fill valve. This will cut off the main water supply. You will notice that the water level in the bowl starts to drop slowly. Wait for a minute or so to observe whether the water level drops back to normal. Then you can let go of the float and let the bowl refill. Don’t worry about the overflowing now. Keep observing to make sure that you stop the water if the level starts increasing too much.

In case the water level doesn’t drop, continue to hold the float while you shut off the water at the toilet supply valve. You can find this valve right behind the toilet on the wall or floor and is easily accessible. Turn it in a clockwise fashion (to the right) to close the valve and stop the water. In case you can’t reach the valve when you are holding the float, you can also let go of the ball and then shut off the valve as quickly as possible.

Steps after the water stop overflowing

Once the water has stopped overflowing here are some further measures you need to take:

• Prevent usage of any toilets, sinks or other plumbing fixtures for some time.
• Remove blockages from the drain by using a good quality plunger.
• Try to establish the root cause of the blockage. Start by examining the bathroom fixtures and proceed upwards.
• You can try to involve someone to observe the lower floor fixtures while you are checking the upstairs drains. Otherwise, it becomes difficult to establish whether upstairs drains are working or not.
• Usually, if a single toilet is blocked, the chances are that only that toilet has an issue. However, if more than one toilet is affected, it may be a critical issue with your pipes or a failing septic field.

If you have tried all our tricks and are still in vain, promptly call the licensed Winnipeg plumbers from Aslan Plumbing to unclog your toilets. Our professionals will arrive quickly and help to take care of the issue quickly and cleanly.