Hopefully, a lack of running water isn’t something you deal with often. Still, most of us at some point are going to have a period of time when our water isn’t running.
Whether your water is off for scheduled maintenance or it’s altogether busted, that doesn’t change when you have to go to the bathroom. And if your water is off, you need a way to flush without running water.
Fortunately, flushing a toilet without running water is surprisingly easy. We’ll explain a few different techniques you can use to flush a toilet when the water is off.
How Flushing a Toilet Works
When you flush a toilet, it may seem like a complex mechanism does all the work. In truth, flushing a toilet is a relatively simple exercise in physics. When your water is running, a toilet flushes by releasing water from the tank into the bowl. In most modern, gravity-fed toilets, the volume of water gradually displaces the existing water in the bowl down into the pipe, where it eventually flows into your sewer line or septic tank.
If you think of flushing in the simplest terms, the addition of more water to a toilet bowl, then flushing a toilet without running water becomes a simple task.
Use a Bucket to Flush a Toilet Without Running Water
Flushing a toilet without running water is as simple as pouring a bucket of water into your toilet bowl. All you need to do is quickly pour about 1.6 gallons of water into the toilet bowl.
The hardest part of flushing a toilet this way might be getting the water.
If the shutoff is planned, you should fill up a bucket or two with water before turning off your water. This way you don’t have to run around asking neighbors for water or empty all of your expensive bottled water into a bucket.
However, if the shutoff was unplanned, you may have a tougher time. You could ask neighbors to fill a bucket of water, provided that the shutdown doesn’t affect the whole neighborhood.
In dire circumstances where there’s no running water nearby, you could fill the bucket with water from a pool, lake, creek, river, or other body of water. Ultimately, the source of water you use doesn’t matter as it will all get flushed into the sewer when you have your water restored.
Need to Restore Running Water to Your Home? Call Mr. Rooter Plumbing
A planned water outage isn’t any reason for concern, even if it’s inconvenient. But if the outage in service was unplanned, especially if it doesn’t seem to be affecting anyone else nearby, you may have a bigger problem. Fortunately, Mr. Rooter Plumbing offers water line repairs and water line replacements that can get your water flowing again.
Do you need to restore running water to your home? Call us to request a service today!
