Water keeps rising into toilet bowl & spilling over

Question

For a while now my hall restroom toilet when flushing will either go down slowly, water will drain but nothing else, or just all together get clogged. I plunge over and over until it finally flushes and again within days same problem persists. Finally it clogged again so I thought. I plunged and water slowly went down. Meanwhile until maintenance comes to check out problem toilet IS NOT in use.

Last night & today I’ve woken up to a restroom completely flooded. With the toilet bowl overflowing with water. 1st thought shut the valve off - done. I cleaned up the mess, emptied the bowl completely and left it alone. Again woke up to a restroom completely flooded and bowl overflowing.

• Why is water steadily rising up into my toilet bowl?
• Where could this all be coming from?

Answer 1

There's a blockage in your sewer pipes. You mentioned waiting "until maintenance comes to check ..." which suggests you may not own the building. That's good news for you -- call again and tell them there seems to be sewage backing up into your room and that they'd better get a plumber immediately.

A plugged sewer vent pipe can also cause weird problems with toilets, but that more often manifests as a toilet that "burps" air bubbles and causes lots of splashing, or causes the water to be vacuumed out of the bowl. Since you have water that rises and stays high it sounds more like a blockage in the drain line downstream from your toilet. The rising water is the waste water sent down a drain or toilet elsewhere in the building.

There are a number of tools a person could use to clear such a blockage. A drain snake or auger is a simple but effective option. It's just a a wire coil -- a long spring -- which one feeds into the drain with hopes that it'll either dislodge the blockage and send it floating away, or else grab the blockage and allow it to be pulled out.

(photo: thespruce.com)

Snakes are offered in multiple diameters and lengths. A larger diameter snake is used when the pipe is larger - if the snake diameter is too small, it'll be prone to tangling itself in the pipe rather than feeding through. A toilet-sized pipe will need a snake that's perhaps 5/8" or larger diameter. If the blockage were in the toilet itself then a short snake would do, and that's a tool that's reasonable to own.

(photo: amazon.com)

In your case though, where the blockage is somewhere further down the pipe, a longer snake will likely be needed. These are often packaged on a cart. This is the sort of tool a homeowner would usually rent rather than buy -- or, probably even more often, hire a plumber to do the job.

(photo: vevor.com)

Answer 2

Greg Hill has an excellent answer for the blockage issue, but that won't cause the bowl to overflow over night and fill the bathroom floor.

That is, most likely, caused by a fault with the fill valve within the toilet tank itself. It could be that the float that is designed to rise with the water and shut off the water flow when it's the right level has gotten jammed so it's not rising (high enough). It could also be an issue with the valve itself not shutting when the float rises. Another possibility is that the flapper valve that seals between the tank and the bowl isn't sealing properly, allowing water to constantly leak into the bowl.

If it weren't for the blockage, you might never notice this leaking issue, because the toilet will flush itself when the water in the bowl rises high enough. Someone would have to be in the bathroom or close enough to it when it flushed itself to notice the "phantom flusher".

Make sure you tell maintenance about both issues, and they should have you taken care of in no time.