How To Remove Toilet Stains Quickly & Easily: Our Top 10 Tips & Tricks

Toilet cleaning is sometimes the household chore you want to avoid. However, it is a necessary chore since the toilet bowl contains bacteria and stains that can be harmful to your family in the long term. Cleaning your toilet may also be hazardous to your health since the products required in the activity mostly contain chemicals. Fortunately, there are hacks to remove toilet stains in a more straightforward and less harmful way.

One rule applies to every method below: use one product at a time and flush well between them. Mixing bleach with vinegar or other acids releases chlorine gas, and mixing it with ammonia releases chloramine gases.

Use Homemade Cleaning Products

There are a lot of toilet cleaning products available on the market. However, the chemical use and shopping inconvenience may push you to try and find other ways to remove toilet stains. Fortunately, there are a lot of household materials that you can use as a substitute for the potentially hazardous cleaning chemicals for your toilet.

Soak Messy Stains in Vinegar

Vinegar is an everyday necessity in the kitchen, with its many uses for different recipes. Fewer people know how well it dissolves the mineral buildup behind many toilet stains. White vinegar is a milder alternative to harsh chemical cleaning products, though it is not a registered disinfectant.

To eliminate toilet stains, you may soak a paper towel or thick tissue roll and place in on top of the messy stains. Family Handyman suggests rolling a vinegar-soaked paper towel under the rim for hard water scale. Leave it overnight to let the vinegar do its work. In the morning, you will be able to scrub off the stains with ease or flush the toilet. Keep vinegar off natural stone floors and counters, since acid can etch them.

Substitute Borax for Bleaching Products

Borax is a boron compound that dissolves in water. Borax has many uses in the laundry room, as well as cleaning your toilet. It is harmful if swallowed, so wear gloves and store it away from kids and pets. Never use it on teeth or skin. The cleaning product works more effectively when added with vinegar. Using your toilet brush, you may apply the borax and vinegar mix on stains to remove them. Flush the toilet to give stains a rinse, and you can watch the water take the stain down with it.

For the toilet stains that you failed to clean despite being brushed off, you may use Borax paste. You have to combine enough vinegar on a lot of borax to get a thick paste. First, turn off the water supply valve and flush to lower the water in the bowl, so the water doesn’t dilute the paste. Spread the borax on the stains and let it sit for 20 minutes. Using a nylon brush, you can scrub off the paste and flush to rinse.

Sanitize Your Toilet With Baking Soda

Baking soda, similar to vinegar, is a household item with the reputation as an alternative toilet cleaner. When mixed with vinegar, it can clear hard water stains quickly. You need to pour vinegar into the toilet water and mix it using a toilet brush. After two minutes, you can add baking soda and more vinegar, creating a fizzing action. After about 10 minutes of mixing, let the solution sit for 30 minutes until it manages to remove the stains. You can flush to rinse the solution and scrub off any remaining stains with a nylon brush.

Bleach Doubles as Toilet Stain Remover

Chlorine bleach is an effective and common way to clean your toilet. Bleach kills germs and lightens many organic stains, but it won’t remove rust or hard water rings. Despite being a potent cleaning agent, bleach can be harmful to your health when misused.

Flush away any vinegar or other cleaner first, open a window, and wear gloves. Then add bleach or a bleach-based bowl cleaner as directed on the label, let it sit, and flush. Never mix bleach with ammonia or any other cleaner.

Disinfect Your Bowl With Hydrogen Peroxide

Hydrogen peroxide may not be able to remove the stains on a toilet altogether, but it proves to be a useful germ eraser. A half cup of hydrogen peroxide around the toilet bowl, left for a while, helps freshen and lighten the bowl. Don’t combine it with bleach or vinegar. You need to flush the toilet to rinse the hydrogen peroxide down the drain, along with the germs and stains.

Alternative Cleaning Materials

While the homemade cleaning products are great solutions for those who do not want to use chemical cleaners, there are also other options you can take to make sure that you get rid of toilet stains. Here are some of the household items that only a few people know can help keep the toilet clean and neat.

Sandpaper

Very fine wet/dry sandpaper can help you remove stubborn mineral rings in the toilet by scrubbing. Use it only with water, light pressure, and on a small area first, because any abrasive can scratch or dull the glaze. Skip it entirely on toilets with a special factory coating. It is also essential for you to avoid losing patience while scrubbing stains that are difficult to remove. Rubbing too much may damage your toilet bowl.

Cola

Rust rings around the toilet are challenging to scrub off. As a solution, you may use a can of cola to remove them. A lot of people will find that cola is a weird solution for toilet cleaning and will wonder how it gained the reputation, but the beverage contains acids and carbonation that can easily dissolve messy stains. You can pour a can on the rim of the toilet to make sure that it reaches every part of the bowl. In an hour, the acid will break down the toilet stains. Then, you can use a toilet scrub to remove the mess and flush to rinse the area.

Pumice Stone

Pumice stone is an unexpected cleaning material for toilet stains, but its effectiveness is undeniable. You can soak the pumice stone in hot water. You can then use the stone the same way you use a toilet brush. You need to make sure that both the toilet and the stone are wet to avoid scratching the surface. Family Handyman says a pumice stone won’t harm porcelain, but Bob Vila’s experts warn against using it on fiberglass, marble, or plastic. With a gentle pumice stone scrub and a flush, most hard water rings will go away.

Cleaning your toilet is a tough but necessary task. Over the years, however, people did experiments to find more straightforward solutions to remove stains. While the experiments led them to everyday household items like vinegar and borax or unexpected things like a can of coke and sandpaper, it is always a welcome sight to know that you can hack your way out of doing the chore.

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Sources

• Dangers of Mixing Bleach with Cleaners, Washington State Department of Health
• 10 Toilet Cleaning Hacks That Make a Dirty Job So Much Easier, Family Handyman
• 6 Genius Pumice Stone Hacks Every Homeowner Should Know, Bob Vila
• How to Safely Clean and Sanitize with Bleach, CDC