We are American and new-ish to the UK so I need some perspective. There are a 3 toilets in our rented house, and not one of them seems to have the ability to dispose of a normal sized poo on the first flush, and quite often not on the second, third, or fourth flush. We do flush mid-poo when we can but it's not always possible, especially for our small kids --who produce surprisingly enormous poops.-- All of this flushing is appallingly wasteful of water, and leads to the disgusting experience of regularly encountering leftover poo when going to the bathroom. It's unpleasant for us and mortifying when we have guests!
If it matters, it is a terraced house, old but refurbished on the inside. Our rent is over£5K/month, which I understand isn't exorbitant by London standards, but I have to think it should entitle us to fully functioning toilets. Actually I think ^everyone^ is entitled to that.
My DH thinks the problem comes from the main pipes in the street so the landlord can't do anything, and I will sound like a spoiled American if I bring it up. But I can't imagine everyone else just lives like this.
AIBU?
AIBU?
To think a toilet should flush a normal sized poo on the first flush?
AlexPKeaton · 31/01/2016 11:20
But mentioning that you pay 5k a month in rent for a terraced house is a weird thing to mention when your gripe is that the toilet flush isn't doing its job very well 
however much rent a person pays, a properly functioning toilet can be expected.
Giant American poo? American things do tend to be bigger 
Your rent is obscene btw and you should look into that.
£60,000 a year in rent?!?
I think King Kong dumps are the least of your problems
We had this problem in our last house (rented) which was an older style house (with little modernisation). The downstairs loo worked fine and became the poo loo!!
The upstairs loo was pathetic for flushing poo or anything more than 1 square of loo paper. Not only that the cistern used to take 15 minutes to refill, so reflushing was not practical unless you had 45 minutes spare because on average it took 3 flushes to get rid of anything!! It was an old fashioned large cistern too, not one of these modern crap water saving things.
I called out the maintenance company several times. Every plumber that came out said it was because the water was coming from a cold water tank in the roof with little pressure and not direct from the mains water. Downstairs loo worked fine because gravity helped. We did live in a low water pressure area, filling the bath took an age too. One plumber played a round with the cistern so it filled up/took in a little more water in the hope that would help but, it did little and added a few extra minutes to the refill time!!
We have recently moved to a modernish house with a very modern bathroom and modern wc with the water saving cisterns. There are 2 buttons. The mini flush (the smaller front button on my loos) is an absolute waste of time. It releases little more than a pathetic splash. Pressing the 2 buttons gives a more substantial flush but I dont feel it flushes as well as a good old fashioned loo. The cystern is at least half the size of that in our old 1950's house. I have visions of poo etc hanging around in the pipes until the next flush. It feels like its just been shoved around the corner of the U bend thing and there is sits. With a more powerful bigger flush I never thought about it much but it felt like it had been flushed away, I just dont feel its been flushed very far at all in this house - hence finding myself pressing the flush every time I walk past the bathroom. Definately not water saving at all.
We did have an unpleasant poo incident a few weeks back . No one in the family is admitting it was them but a large poo was reluctant to shift so after several flush attempts I used a bucket of water which did the trick. You could try this but I totally get its not how we expect to live in 2016.
I would perhaps ask the landlord to investigate and send a plumber out to investigate, or source a tarditional cistern aand ask for it to be fitted in the name of going retro!!
£5K is a bargain This 4 bed flat is £32.5k per month to rent...
misses point of thread from shock of finding a flat with a £32.5K a month rent pricetag
Don’t want to miss threads like this?
Weekly
Sign up to our weekly round up and get all the best threads sent straight to your inbox!
Log in to update your newsletter preferences.
You've subscribed!
Thank you so much for all of this great plumbing advice. I think I will make chili for dinner so we can test out the various suggestions 
. As it happens, the toilets are actually not that new, and they have regular flush levers rather than the two buttons. I do appreciate the explanation about the buttons, though. I was flummoxed by those the first time we were here!
Re: the rent, I agree it is insane, but it is a temporary relocation and my DH's employer is paying the rent. For various reasons they really needed him at short notice and needed him to be in a particular location, and part of the deal was that they would put us up in something roughly comparable to what we have at home. To actually do that would have been way more than £5K, as we live in a fairly cheap area at home, but we found a middle ground. There is NO way we could remotely afford to pay that much ourselves, and if the employer would have offered to give DH the money directly we would have found a cheaper place. But they didn't, so here we are. It is indeed a lovely house in an lovely neighborhood, and the rent is fair market value. If it makes a difference, I had to leave my job to move here and it may or may not be there when we get back.
I only mentioned the rent to illustrate that we would expect everything to work more or less flawlessly, and that the landlord could easily afford to fix the issue if it is possible to do so.
To comment on this thread you need to create a Mumsnet account.