A leaking toilet, and a ceiling that had taken the water.
It came in as an emergency. The video at the top was filmed on the call, sound and all, and it shows the water itself, running out of a crack in the ceiling in a thin line. The first photograph is the same ceiling, with a long crack running across it and a darker band of stained plaster spreading out along the crack, wider than the crack itself. The second is the toilet end, behind the pan: the braided feed pipe coming off the wall, and a plastic jug on the floor underneath it.
Under the bathroom floor
Water from a leaking toilet does not stay on the bathroom floor. It finds the gaps round the pan and round the pipes, gets under the floor covering, soaks into the boards and then sits on top of the ceiling of the room below, which is plasterboard or old lath and plaster and was never meant to hold water. It spreads out up there first, out of sight, which is why the stain in the first photograph is so much wider than the crack in it. Then the ceiling starts to give. The plaster softens, the joints open, and a crack appears along the line where the water has gathered. Once there is a crack the water has a way out, and it comes through in a line, which is what the video caught. Left long enough, a ceiling that is holding water can sag and come down, and a ceiling with a light fitting in it has the electrics in the wet as well. That is why our emergency page puts water coming through a ceiling in the calls that cannot wait until the morning, even when it looks like a slow drip.
Where toilets leak
A toilet can leak from more than one place, and they all end up on the same patch of floor.
The feed into the cistern. The joint between the cistern and the pan. The connector where the pan meets the waste pipe, which often only leaks when the toilet is flushed. Or the cistern itself. People search "toilet leaking through ceiling when flushed" for that reason, because a leak that only shows on a flush is one of the hardest to catch in the act.
Somebody here had already put a jug under the feed pipe. We are not going to name the failed part from a photograph, and on a call like this the first job is stopping the water.
Turning it off
Turn the water off at the stopcock. Our emergency page says where to look: under the kitchen sink in most houses, and in flats often the airing cupboard or a service riser on the landing.
The flat above
When the toilet is in somebody else’s home, the job starts with finding which home it is, and we wrote that one up in water through the ceiling, flat above.
Ring 07546 185778 and say where the water is coming through, whether it is near a light, and whether you have managed to turn it off.
