Toilet Bowl Cleaning
Learn how to clean toilet bowls from the pros! Cleaning toilet bowls, whether it is in your home or office, can be very challenging. No matter how much you scrub it and pour acid on it or what-not, stains seem to stick so hard, you are tempted to replace it instead. Toilet bowls that were not tended or weren’t given enough cleaning attention can be more challenging, especially if the last cleaning made was a couple of weeks ago already.
Below, you can find an extensive way of cleaning toilet bowls and how you could do it like a pro. All steps are detailed and all cleaning materials are commercially available.
Need something cleaned?
Getting Ready for your Toilet Bowl Cleaning
You will need the following:
- Rubber gloves – those that you use for laundry and cleaning other parts of the bathroom or house.
- Face mask – safety first! We don’t want anything splashing toward your mouth or inhaling any fumes from the cleaning chemicals.
- Toilet bowl brush – Nylon or plastic, as long as it has bristles or rough surface that can scrub your toilet bowl, and have a long handle so you don’t get elbow deep in cleaning.
- Commercial Toilet Bowl Cleaner – Anything that is off the shelf from your grocery store that says “Toilet Bowl Cleaner”.
- Sponge Scrubber – Commercially known as “Scotch Brite”.
- Pail and basin/water sprinkler – anything that you can use to rinse your toilet bowl.
Cleaning your Toilet Bowl
As soon as you have them all, here are the step by step process on how to clean your toilet bowl like a pro:
- Wear your safety gear – mask, goggles, rubber gloves.
- Remove the cover of your toilet bowl water tank/reservoir.
- Using your pail or water sprinkler, wet your toilet bowl – this will loosen up the dirt a little bit and prepare the surface for easier chemical interaction.
- Using your toilet bowl brush, lightly scrub your toilet bowl, especially on surfaces with stain – this is so that the chemicals can interact with the stain faster.
- Pour in some toilet bowl cleaner – check the instructions on exactly how much you need to pour, but generally, you should have the whole toilet bowl surface thinly covered with the chemical. Alternatively, you can pour 2 caps (the cap that came with the toilet bowl cleaner) in your toilet bowl where the water is, and also 2 caps in the water tank/reservoir. scrub it to lather and use the foam to cover the whole surface.
- Let it soak and stand for 10-15 minutes – you can do some other light chores while waiting for this step to end.
Splash a little water on your toilet bowl.- Start scrubbing using your toilet bowl brush – most of the stain are easy to remove by now with just a few brush strokes. If there are still hard to remove stains, use your sponge scrubber. If the stain still persist, repeat steps 3-6.
- Scrub the inside of your toilet bowl tank/reservoir – Since this part was soaked longer and came into contact with the cleaning chemicals more without drying up, this would be easier to scrub and clean.
- Flush your toilet – this would flush down and replace the water present in the bowl. By this time you should be able to see an improvement in your toilet bowl. There could be some random stains here and there which you may have missed due to the suds/foam, you can simply scrub it off or repeat steps 3-6 if you need to.
- Rinse your whole toilet bowl – get rid of the extra suds around your toilet bowl.
- Establish a regular cleaning schedule for your toilet bowl – this way, you can ensure that the next cleaning would be much lighter than what you have just did. Ideally, cleaning should be done at 3 to 7 days interval.
What is the best commercial toilet bowl cleaner?
We have found that Mr. Muscle Toilet Cleaner is the strongest in terms of cleaning power, as we have discussed in our Toilet and Bath Challenge article. Although, since it is the strongest in our experience, it is to be used with most care as it sends off an offensive smell due to some of its ingredients – Hydrochloric Acid and Hypochloric Acid.
What is the difference between a toilet bowl cleaner, an all-purpose cleaner, and a disinfectant cleaner?
Chemical composition. They all contain surfactants but they contain different levels of acids or chlorine compound derivatives. All-purpose cleaners mainly contain surfactants only, and disinfectants mainly contain chlorine compound derivatives, while toilet bowl cleaners contain a mixture of both.
What makes this diferent from any other ways of cleaning toilet bowls?
Soaking – we usually just splash, scrub, rinse away any surface we clean, and when the stain doesn’t go away after a rigorous scrubbing, we give up. Almost all chemicals we use for cleaning requires some soaking time, this will give the stain and the chemicals more time to react with each other. Each chemicals interact with different stains, either they dissolve the stain or loosen it up, but either way, it needs some time to do its job.
We hope that you learned a lot from this article. If you are still having a hard time cleaning your toilet bowls, or is in need of professional cleaning help, contact us or send us a message on Facebook. For more cleaning tips, check out our other blog articles.