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?