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?

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.

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.

This sounds interesting. It makes me wonder why no cisterns already have built-in softeners.

OTOH, if I am willing to accept the extra home improvement effort and complexity anyway, I wonder if I am better off harvesting rainwater, which I presume is soft water. A friend does this. After flushing, we hear a pump turn on to pump water from the rain reservoir to the cistern. A pump does not appeal to me, but I wonder if I could do a ceiling mounted reservoir on the top floor and then rely on gravity to feed the cisterns.

Indeed I do the same. Clean acid to descale kitchen appliances, usually muliple times. Then that gets recycled for dirty (bathroom) jobs. Though the kettle cleaning acids tend to be weak, I think. Vinegar is not potent enough for tough jobs. And I probably would not try hydrochloric acid in metal kettles.

I wonder if it makes sense to mix recycled vinegar with hydrochloric acid in a toilet -- or whether that’s playing with fire.

Citric acid is less commonly available, but since you say it can work in metal kettles and also the toilet, it piques my interest.. I’ll have to consider tracking some down.

Because softeners have a maintenance cycle, most people want to just have one that serves the whole house rather than little ones for each appliance like some people do with water heaters. The pouch in the cistern is definitely not totally effective, but it's a small upfront cost as opposed to the cost of plumbing in a system that costs hundreds.

As for rainwater, there are two parts there: the idea itself and the ceiling storage. I've been wanting to do rainwater for a long time. It's not terribly complex, but requires a bit of money and effort to set up. It's usually almost pure unless you live in an area with awful air quality, and if it's only for the toilet(s) it should be fine anyway. On the other hand, the other part with the high mounted storage has to be done very carefully. Depending on your location, you would have to balance storage amount to last between rains, and as the storage gets bigger it gets extremely heavy. (A 50 gal drum of water is over 400 lbs, or ~190kg) A pump you have to service/replace every few years is way easier to deal with than trying to set up a structure to safely hold hundreds of kilos/pounds over your head in a place where leaks could mean heavy water damage to the house.

Depending on your location, you would have to balance storage amount to last between rains, and as the storage gets bigger it gets extremely heavy. (A 50 gal drum of water is over 400 lbs, or ~190kg) A pump you have to service/replace every few years is way easier to deal with than trying to set up a structure to safely hold hundreds of kilos/pounds over your head in a place where leaks could mean heavy water damage to the house.

There are small 50 liter hot water tanks that hang on the wall. There are just two bolts going into brick. When I first saw that, I was suprised that it was safe to do but it is in fact how they are meant to be installed. I think these are even bigger than 50L:

If someone is uncomfortable with the factory design, there is this aftermarket mounting system that uses 4 bolts:

People throw away hot water tanks like this all the time, which I thought could be repurposed for rain harvesting. All my cisterns have two inputs, left and right, depending on where the pipework is. And they are already connected to tap water with a valve. So I could easily pipe rain water to the unused cistern input and turn off the tap valve, and turn the tap valve on if the reservoir is empty. I guess gravity fed water would be slow to fill, but probably fast enough if there aren’t many users.

I was thinking I could cut a hole in the top of an old tank for the input then on the top side have an overflow hole near the top that feeds the downspout.

Pretty much. Brick is pretty good for load bearing so 50kg of water is not insane with the right hardware. Some anchors I've used were rated to do that with one screw, though I wouldn't. I read your previous part as hanging from or inside of the ceiling but wall mounting should be good.

As for using heaters at all, it might not be purpose built, but it's hard to beat free, even if they might have some quirks. The trick will be getting pressure moving in the right ways at the right time. The line coming from outside should give enough air to let water flow down easily to the cistern as long as you keep out contaminants/wildlife. A first flush and mesh should be able to manage that. And while I haven't worked with ones like the top pair, ones like the bottom image, in grey, usually have a port at the bottom for draining/cleaning and you could cap off the cold water port, meaning you wouldn't have to make extra holes. The hot water outlet port is usually at the top of the inner tank so it'd be fine.

The one thing I'm spotting is to remember the supply line has pressure and a very large supply, so you will have to make sure to either have a one way flow check valve or some other measure to keep it from sending water back up toward your rainwater inlet when using the piped supply or you could end up with a new pool where you don't want it. Otherwise, very cool idea.