Last week John and I finally got to go on our honey moon. We picked a small beach town in South Carolina to stay. It was so nice to spend some time away from all of the hustle and bustle!! While we were enjoying lunch one day at this delicious sea food bar, we met a really awesome couple. They were locals to the area who came in to have a few drinks. We got to talking about what we do for a living and they seemed to be super interested. Most of the time when John and I are talking to strangers about what we do for a living, they almost always have a story to tell about how their sewer backed up. We LOVE hearing these stories.
This couple we met told us a story about how at their last house they needed their septic tank pumped. The gentleman who came to pump their tank told the wife that he noticed some flushable wipes in there. He let her know she really shouldn’t be using them. She was astonished because she never used flushable wipes and didn’t understand how they could have been in there. We told her that flushable wipes really don’t disintegrate like toilet paper and it’s a possibility that those wipes could have been from a previous owner. Then she said something that hit me so hard that I knew exactly what I needed to write about next… She said “well why are flushable wipes marketed as flushable if you really shouldn’t flush them?”.
Here’s some insight: Your sewer system is made to only handle human waste and water. That’s it. Anything else can get caught and cause major issues. Toilet paper is made to disintegrate quickly where flushable wipes are not. We get a lot of blocked sewer line calls in where the main culprit is flushable wipes. Here’s a cool experiment I did to show how toilet paper, flushable wipes and disinfectant wipes disintegrate differently.
Some other commonly flushed items are, antibacterial wipes, feminine sanitary items, Qtips, and cotton balls. Please do not flush these items down the drain. They do not break down and cause major issues.
