This may be a dumb question, so I apologize in advance. My mom is a better housekeeper than I am, nobody would deny that. But growing up, our two toilets in the house were always spotless white porcelain, and I certainly don’t remember any of us constantly scrubbing them down with a wire brush, or using any toilet bowl cleaners on them. My mom wasn’t a big fan of harsh cleaners and cleansers, and made sure nothing ever got nasty.
Now that I’m living in a friend’s house, every month or so (if I let it go that long), I get a nasty brown-gray ring around the water line in my toilet, that I’m constantly having to scrub clean. I use a Toilet Duck-type product to squirt blue cleaning fluid around the sides of the bowl and under the rim, let it roll down, and then scrub some more. Does this have something to do with my toilet, the quality of our water, me being a bad cleaner, or some combination of all those factors?
My bet is that your Mom’s place has soft water. I have the same problem because our water is well-water, and damn-near solid with dissolved minerals. Get a lime remover.
My guess would be it’s an algae or mold of some kind that lives in your environment. Adding a product that releases bleach into the water as the bowl fills may help.
Where I live now, I never get a ring around the water line. But when I lived in DC the entire inside of the bowl below the water line would be covered in brown yuck if I let it go a few weeks.
I have my house cleaned once a month. I have noticed that the ring in my toilets shows up right around the time it is due to be cleaned. I like it because it reminds me to put away the stuff I wouldn’t want the cleaning lady to see.
