cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/66371627
I have 2 methods for descaling toilets in my house, which has quite hard water.
(using physics) high pressure washer
Yeah, you read that right. I setup a high pressure washer inside my home and blast it into my toilet. It works. I think it did the job in under 15 min.
I actually freaked out at first because I thought I was looking at a shattered porcelain bowl. But in fact the urine stone that built up over the years was a solid layer a few millimeters thick. So it shattered the limescale into big pieces that looked like a broken cereal bowl in my toilet bowl, but the porcelain was fine.
Of course it’s not pretty. When you blast a toilet bowl with high pressure water, it blasts back at you. Not ideal to have toilet scum blasting back in my face and all over the floor and wall behind me. When the first wave of spashback hit me I snapped into what must have resembled Jessie Ventura in Predator, where he mowed down the forest with a helicopter machine gun… “aaahh! die motherfucker!” as the shower from the toilet persisted. Hence why I only used this method once. I suppose that’s why it’s my original idea and no YouTubers are telling people to do that.
(using chemistry) acids
After a few yrs it was time to descale again, this time trying acid.
Vinegar is useless. Probably just too weak. Bleach (which was used alone, obviously not combined with any acids), was also useless.
So I bought some pricey proprietary acid in a powder form, which is labeled specifically for this purpose. Instructions direct letting it sit for 30 min. I don’t put stock into that… not with my toilets after years of buildup. So I let it sit overnight. It bubbles up, so I can see it’s doing some work. But it’s no match for my brown urine stone. So I use a power drill with a really stiff nylon brush attachment (not the flimsy attachments that are intended for toilet bowls which are just like a hand held toilet brush but with a shank). It’s slower than the pressure washer. The spinning brush does not get into corners well, so it takes hours. It’s not as messy as the pressure washer but still not great that strong acid is splashing around getting on my drill and attacking anything metallic. I suppose I should oil all exposed metal parts before doing this.
I wonder if I should stop being stingey and go heavy on the acid. I wonder if chemicals alone can really do all the work without need for mechanical force. Although the ring around the low edge of the rim is hard to give an acid bath to.
better methods?
YT videos often mention “brick acid”. Not sure what that is but it does not seem to exist where I am. Or perhaps that’s the same as whatever proprietary stuff I used.
Is there a long term fix? I normally do no regular maintenance. If I brush the bowls weekly or something, is it feasible to keep the limescale from ever starting?
Chemists say urine stone is caused by urine mixing with water – which is a bit baffling because surely urine is composed mostly of water to begin with. So the question is, what about the hippy mantra: “yellow, let it mellow; brown, flush it down”? Does urine stone accumulate quicker if you flush every time (thus urine mixes with more water)? 1 flush per 10 urinations means much less water is introduced into the mix. OTOH, the urine has lots of time to become urine stone as it sits.
I once looked at the low-water consuming toilet in a water depleted region, like Las Vegas. It was like a pressure washer integrated into the toilet. Instead of a cistern full of water, it had some kind of device in the cistern. Flushes were fast and violent to minimize water use. I wonder if that design would also be anti-scaling.
I also suspect ultrasonic cleaners could perhaps be of use here. Wouldn’t it solve the problem if a toilet bowl had an integrated ultrasonic generator that runs periodically? Or if I could submerse one manually sometimes?
Depending on your circumstances, you have options. A water softener is the strongest defense against hard water, but that’d would be a big upfront cost and a modest ongoing maintenance cost for the salt, and technically, given enough time with soft water, the minerals will leach back off the bowl walls, but that’s a long wait for not much action.
There are ‘toilet cleaner dispensers’ that can put out a dose of something with each flush, which could help in less time than the wait above, but still waiting.
Because toilets are porcelain, most more intense forms of removal are problematic. Pumice and other abrasives risk creating scratching/pitting that deposits adhere to. Mecahical attacks like scalers can chip/crack/break the glaze/porcelain, which is so much worse. If you were really desperate to escape the deposits maybe you could replace the toilet itself with a metal one and use wire brushes/scalers, or some other form of waste disposal like a composting/vacuum/incinerating toilet. I’ve been half considering going to composting toiletry just as a way to boost soil fertility, albeit slowly, but not dealing with water deposits would be a benefit in many areas.
Regarding the pressure washing, if you try it again, you might try tenting the toilet bowl with heavy plastic taped to the rim and a hole for the wand to enter, just to minimize splash.
Could you maybe just put the water softener salt pellets in the upper tank? Not all at once, of course, but a few pellets per week?
The salt doesn’t soften the water directly. If I remember correctly, it’s a resin that collects the charged particles of minerals in the water and the system is flushed with the salt to ‘reactivate’ the resin. Now that I think about it, it might be technically possible to mount a core in the cistern and then manually salt it every so often, but I’m not sure.
Edit: Looking into it for a minute, it looks doable. There are premade mesh pouches containing cation resin beads that seem to be for aquarists. If there’s a bit of acceptable loss of cistern capacity, it would be pretty easy to put one in.
How about cleaning the toilet more than once every couple of years?
That was one of my questions. I am looking for min effort. If a quick brushing simply prevents the limescale, that would be less time and effort. But if limescale would still build up anyway, then I would not be interested as it would just add to the big effort every few yrs.
Brushing won’t do it, chemistry is your friend.
Essentially a brick of material that goes in the tank that slowly dissolves.
I have seen those blocks of something that go either in the cistern or hang under the rim. I was never quite sure if they were for aroma, disinfecting, or if they did something to control limescale.
I don’t suppose they would all be created equal. Guess I need to look into it.
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