#3 Removing tough limescale from your toilet

How to Remove Limescale from Your Toilet

Ah, the humble lavatory. A place where we relieve not only our bodily needs but also the stress of a long day. Our trusty friend and companion, the loo, deserves proper care. Limescale, a devilish little thing, lurks in the water and grips onto our lovely white toilet bowl, leading to unsightly discolouration. To help, we've put together a guide on the do's and don'ts of removing limescale from your toilet.

What is Limescale?

Before tackling the beast, it's essential to know what it is. Limescale is a hard, chalky deposit mainly made up of calcium carbonate (CaCO3). It builds up in places where “hard water” evaporates, often found in kettles, hot water boilers, and pipework. Limescale usually turns an off-white to grey, pink, or reddish-brown colour. Besides being hard to clean and displeasing to the eye, it can cause serious damage to plumbing and heating components.

Did you know :

• Limescale is mainly present in the south of the uk due to the hard water

• Limescale separates very quickly from water at 55 degrees Celsius, it's why kettles, showers, dishwashers etc really suffer with this.
  

How NOT to Remove Limescale

There are many cleaning myths out there, so we've tried and tested the most popular methods to give you the results.

Bleach: Common bleach is a household favourite for removing tough stains, brightening surfaces, and disinfecting. However, it doesn’t remove limescale. It merely brightens the discolouration, making the limescale more destructive as you can’t see it and are unaware of the damage it’s doing.

Coca-Cola: According to this myth, pouring a bottle of Coca-Cola into the toilet bowl and leaving it overnight will destroy the limescale due to the acid in the cola. Our test results were not great; all we got was a cola-coloured limescale stain.

Would you believe some people recommend sand paper! Do not use Sandpaper, metal scrapers, even metal brillo pads you will likely scratch and do more damage than the limescale.

How to Remove Limescale from Your Toilet

Now that we've debunked those myths, here are a few DIY methods for de-scaling your toilet. You will need:

• White vinegar

• Elbow grease and limescale remover

Your friend here is time and dwell time, you need to use dwell time of the products to your advantage.

Method 1: Using White Vinegar

You can get 5L of distilled vinegar at a good price online.

1. Clean the toilet thoroughly, and then try to scoop out as much water as you can, ideally you want to do this before bed to leave the vinegar soaking over night, if you do this without taking the water out you will weaken the acid in the vinegar, now Pour 1 litre of undiluted white vinegar into the bowl, ensuring it covers all sides.

2. Let it sit for at least 3 hours, but ideally overnight.

3. Using a toilet brush or scrubbing sponge with more white vinegar, scrub the toilet bowl.

4. Flush to remove all residue.

5. Repeat until your toilet is sparkling like new!

6. Remember time is your friend here.

Method 2: Limescale remover & elbow grease

1. Find a reputable limescale remover

2. Scrub the inside of the toilet with the product and give it plenty of dwell time to take action

3. Continue until the majority of the limescale is gone.

4. Again time is your friend here, with limescale and DIY approaches it's a long game, be consistent and you will win.
   

5. Flush the loo to remove any residue and clean the toilet as you usually would.
   

Need professional cleaning help? Check out our one-off deep cleaning service, we have professional grade limescale removing chemicals not found in shops!

IMPORTANT :- Do not mix cleaning products, you can create very dangerous gases that can in the right conditions hospitalise you, cause life long lung and eye damage and in rare cases even kill you!