plumbingtoilet
I've always heard that you shouldn't flush baby wipes because
I currently live in a modern, multi-story apartment building. There is no septic system and only a few inches of pipe between the toilet bowl and the main sewage line. In what ways can wipes possibly damage this system?
Your problem is the sewer, not the "fresh" water.
Activity on another floor is almost certainly sucking water out of the sewer trap at your laundry and/or bathroom sink. The dry trap then has no resistance to rising sewer gas. Doing laundry fills the trap back up. Here's what it might look like in the wall behind your laundry machine. For proper operation the U shaped part must be full of water at all times:
We're talking China, so shoddy design or construction are a possibility. If the sewer trap is not vented, or is S shaped rather than P shaped ,it is vulnerable to siphoning dry. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_(plumbing)
Test this next time you have the smell. Slowly pour about 1 liter of fresh clean water down into the drains near the laundry, and see if the smell starts to dissipate.
You can fix this by crudely mounting a second waste trap between the washer and the building's trap. This could even include an "automatic air admittance valve" just to act as a vent without the need to penetrate the roof or reach a window.
Slow flushing is not a symptom of a clog in the main line, that's not how toilets work.
You are probably thinking the pipe is full of water, so the toilet is having a hard time adding more, but if your pipe was full of water you would have water coming out of your bathtub! And every sink downstairs would be full of water.
A slow flushing toilet is simply an old, bad, toilet. It has nothing to do with the sewer line.
A sewer line is empty usually, unlike supply lines, sewer lines do not normally having anything in them, except for the few seconds after use. Even if the main line was slow (which it probably isn't), the small amount of water in the toilet would simply fill up the pipe above that part at a normal speed, then move down a bit slower - you would notice nothing.
Get yourself a new toilet, I like the Toto brand, you can buy one on Amazon for about $200.
If you had a clog the symptoms would be different: When you started using the sink it would work completely normally. Only after you ran the sink for a while (5 - 10 minutes even) it would start to slow down, and then it would stop draining and the water would just sit there. You would wait a long time and that water would very slowly drain down.
Best Answer
The problems don't stop at your system/pipes.
Just as they don't dissolve in your septic system (should you have one), they don't dissolve in the water company's septic system and can clog the equipment in the local sewage works that isn't designed to handle such "solid" waste.
While one or two wipes from one person probably won't do too much damage, if everyone did it it would cause major problems.
As for problems to your system there's a good chance that the baby wipes will get caught up in any bends - specifically the U-bend in the toilet itself.