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Yhe hydrochloric acid in Lysol cleaner won’t kill this, and Lime Away doesn’t seem to touch it either. Any ideas on what this might be, and what would kill it?
I don’t think there’s hydrochloric acid in Lysol. Have you gone after it with bleach and a scrub brush?
That’s what I’d start with. Toss some bleach with (that’s the main (only) ingredient in most toilet bowl cleaners, scrub it, let it sit for a half hour, scrub it again if it’s not clean and see how it looks then.
In fact, anything you try, you should probably let sit in the bowl for a while.
There’s HCl in the Lysol toilet cleaner. They brag about it on the bottle. But I can try bleach.
Just checked the MSDS on the Lysol website, so there is. I’m surprised there’s HCL in a consumer product that you can buy at the grocery store. Must be in fairly low levels. If you want something a bit stronger you can go to Home Depot and pick up Muriatic Acid. My reading says that Lysol is 9.5%HCL, Muriactic acid should be closer to 30-40% HCL.
If you didn’t get a toilet bowl cleaner with bleach, I’d try that as well. Also, you didn’t say if you tried scrubbing it with a scrub brush, also try that.
Also, be careful with anything that has HCL in it (especially muriatic acid) that’ll take your skin off.
You need a toilet pumice stone. 10 minutes work. Wear gloves.
Go to Amazon and search for ‘toilet pumice’. I recommend the Scouring Stick. YOu can find it in most hardware stores.
The stain actually looks like a metal – judging by the color, probably copper from the water supply pipes. Try putting about a dozen 500 mg Vitamin C tablets in the bowl. Let them dissolve and sit for a few hours. Ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) complexes most metals, including copper. The ascorbic acid-metal complex is water soluble, so you can then flush away the stain.
I’ve never heard of a toilet pumice stone before. If the OP has a Magic Eraser on hand, I’d start with that (but not in combo with the HCL), just some 409 or something. Also, which ever she(?) uses, it might make life easier to turn off the water and flush the toilet so there isn’t water sloshing around in there.
When I want to get clothes white, I don’t use bleach, I use Whitebrite. Try sprinkling some in there and letting it sit for a while. It gets out rust and iron stains from clothes. It’s worth a try in the toilet.
The Works Toilet Cleaner. It’s worked on worse for me. Around here you can find it at The Dollar Store. And even if you use the whole bottle - its a dollar. I pour it in and walk away for awhile. No pumice, no special stuff - it just freakin works for some reason.
No need to turn off the water. Just rapidly empty a bucket of water into the bowl and that will flush it.
Muratic acid FTW (it’s sold for adding to swimming pools at any big box hardware store). About $7 a gallon. Ensure that you’ve cleaned any bleach out of the bowl. Open the windows. Don’t let any touch anything but the porcelain.
Avoid breathing the fumes it will produce at all costs (because, you know, breathing gaseous chlorine and having it turn back into hydrochloric acid in your lungs is fairly unpleasant).
If you have a septic system, expect the entire ‘bacterial culture’ in your tank to die screaming. Neutralize the acid with a good amount of baking soda, and then dump in some Rid-X. If you have metal pipes? Don’t use muratic acid, it will do bad things. PVC is fine.
Muratic acid is the ultimate “I’m tired of screwing with this” solution. It’s the nuclear option. Your crapper will, however, be more gleaming white than when it was brand new.
Just to make it explicitly clear, we’re talking here about a substance that will etch concrete.
Just for the sake of safety, if you do this… by ‘neutralize it with baking soda’, I do NOT mean dump baking soda directly into muratic acid. Doing so would be extremely stupid. Instead, once you have cleared the acid from the bowl by flushing, you can flush baking soda down the bowl so that it mixes with the diluted acid solution in your septic tank. The end result of the reaction will simply be salt water, but the actual reaction of pure muratic acid and backing soda would be rather violent.
Strange, that my bottle of Lysol toilet cleaner doesn’t exactly brag about it. It’s mentioned in teeny-tiny print in the ingredients list.
Anyway, note also that the liquid solution of Lysol toilet cleaner is a rather thick and viscous glop, so you squirt it all over the inside of your toilet bowl and it will coat the surface and stay there (more or less) for a while instead of just all running off. Let it sit for 10 minutes. Keep windows open and room well-ventilated (although I found it smells rather nice, and not irritating or caustic-smelling, and it hasn’t etched my lungs that I can tell).
It takes rust stains off, too. So if you have copper stains, maybe it will work for that.
I’d be suspicious of using pumice. Won’t that just leave your nice shiny porcelain not-so-shiny-anymore?
So what? Vinegar will etch concrete and we swallow that every day.
Any acid will etch concrete. Cement is a fairly soluble alkaline salt. It’s not hard to etch. The fact that a substance will etch concrete tells you nothing about how dangerous it is or how well it will remove stains.
Back to the OP: Go to the hardware store and buy some phosphoric acid. It is sold literally as toilet acid or as rust inhibitor depending how much you want. Dump abut 25mL it in the toilet and leave it for an hour. Flush. No need to neutralise.
As you observe, it’s in Muriatic Acid, which has been an off-the-shelf consumer product for well over fifty years, and probably a hundred. My Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments advised me to use Muriatic Acid as a substitute for hydrochloric acid.
What amazes me is that some car washes actually used hydrofluoric acid as a commercial cleaner, a substance which is FAR scarier than hydrochloric acid.
Last time I checked, they make products, like CLR, for this specific purpose. This really looks like a simple “hard-water” stain. I don’t know if you are using well water or not but even municipal water can have a higher mineral content resulting in this type of staining. I know I had this problem when I lived in upstate Illinois and the water was from the Lake.
Crazy how people were recommending nuclear-grade solutions for a hard-water stain.
I’m finding the website’s offer to buy a framed print of a dirty toilet strangely amusing…
I’ve ordered a framed print. Thanks!
I would second the pumice stone. I had bad blackish iron stains in my toilet and 10 minutes with the pumice stone got rid of them. No harsh chemicals either.