Seven Things You Should Never Put Down the Toilet or Sink
Two of these are on almost every household's list of things they flush regularly, and both cause serious blockages.
By Erin Whitlock · Method tested by the WikiBright workshop team
Drain blockages are almost entirely self-inflicted, and the culprits are a short and consistent list.
1. Wet wipes, including flushable ones
By some distance the biggest cause of domestic and municipal blockages. Wet wipes are made from bonded fibres designed not to fall apart when wet — that is their entire function.
"Flushable" means it will leave your toilet bowl. It does not mean it will break down. Toilet paper disintegrates in seconds in moving water; a flushable wipe survives hours of agitation intact and then catches on the first rough joint in the pipe.
2. Cooking fat and oil
It pours in as a liquid at 180 degrees and sets solid on a pipe at 12 degrees, roughly a metre along. Then everything else sticks to it.
Running hot water afterwards does not help — it moves the fat further down the run, to a colder pipe you cannot access.
Instead: let it cool in the pan, wipe out with kitchen paper, and bin it. For larger volumes, pour into a jar and bin the jar when full.
The fatbergs that make the news are wet wipes bound together by cooking fat. Those two items on this list are responsible for most of the problem between them.
3. Coffee grounds
They do not dissolve. They settle in the trap and compact into a dense sludge that water will not shift. Put them in the compost or the bin.
4. Rice, pasta and flour
Rice and pasta continue absorbing water and swelling for a long time. Flour plus water is paste, which is a substance specifically designed to stick things together inside a narrow tube.
5. Cotton buds, cotton wool and sanitary products
None of these break down. Cotton buds in particular are the right shape to lodge sideways across a pipe and catch everything that follows.
6. Paint, solvents and white spirit
Chemically damaging to the treatment process and, in many places, illegal to pour away. Water-based paint should be dried out — leave the tin open, or add sawdust or cat litter — and then binned as solid waste. Solvents go to a household waste recycling centre.
7. Medicines
Pharmaceuticals pass through treatment plants largely intact and end up in watercourses. Take unwanted medicines back to a pharmacy, which will dispose of them properly and free.
One more worth adding: hair. It cannot be helped in the shower, but a drain protector over the plughole costs almost nothing and catches essentially all of it. Hair bound with soap is the number one bathroom blockage.
The two-minute prevention routine
- A drain protector in every shower and bath.
- A jar by the hob for used cooking fat.
- A small bin in the bathroom so wipes have somewhere obvious to go.
- A kettle of boiling water down the kitchen sink monthly.
Between them these cost almost nothing and prevent the great majority of blockages people call a plumber for.
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