In a mood to make comparison, I bought a whole bunch of bottles of toiilet bowl cleaner, tried them each once, and now that I want to use one of them, they are all clogged by their own dried out stuff.
How do I free up that clog?
If I weigh down the bottle and soak the whole thing in the sink or bathtub, will toilet bowl cleaner damage the sink or bathtub?
One of the bottles contains "acidic" toilet bowl clean.
Soak it in a glass bowl and you won't have to ask asinine questions.
That's 3 strikes. Kerplunk
Just in time for Thanksgiving...a turkey!
Mickey:
Most COMMERCIAL toilet bowl cleaners are gelled phosphoric acid or gelled hydrochloric acid. Generally, phosphoric acid is strong enough to remove anything normally found in a toilet bowl, but hydrochloric acid based cleaners are very much more agressive and will remove marks on the porcelain left by using metal tools in the toilet bowl, like a plumber's snake. If only one of your bottles says that it contains acid, then most of what you have was purchased in a supermarket, not a janitorial supply store.
Never use hydrochloric acid in a bath tub or sink because it will attack chrome plating, including the chrome plating on the tub or sink drain. It'll also attack any chrome plating on your faucets if you get hydrochloric acid on those too.
Phosphoric acid is not only used as a toilet bowl cleaner, but as the active ingredient in general purpose bathroom cleaners as well. That's because it cuts through soap scum like a hot knife cuts through butter, but it won't attack chrome plating even at high concentrations.
I've used both phosphoric acid and hydrochloric acid based toilet bowl cleaners for the past 25 years for all kinds of different reasons, and never had one "dry out" on me as you describe. You may be using a bathroom cleaner like "Scrubbing Bubbles" which I don't think contains any acid at all.
Your best bet is to simply remove the dried up clog with a knife or something and throw the dried up stuff in your garbage. Plastics are generally immune to acids and bases so dumping dried up acid in your garbage won't burn a hole in the garbage bag.
Inquiring minds want to know how that toilet bowl cleaner is going to get to the bathtub if all he does is weight the container down and put it in a bathtub with water. And even if a tiny bit does come out, it's going to be diluted by 10+ gallons of water in the tub. It's not going to harm anything.
I presume this is a spray container? If so, just remove the spray part and soak that in a sink. If it's the whole inside of the container that's dried up, then I don't understand the bathtub idea at all.
Well, Trader, that's exactly it.
What do these containers look like? Are they spray bottles or something else. And, how does one go about "weighing them down" so they don't float in the water? I have no idea what Mickey would end up doing here, so I thought it would be prudent to at least warn him/her that any hydrochloric acid based toilet bowl cleaner could attack the chrome plating on the bathtub drain, so that he/she'd be able to avoid doing any harm.
Thanks Nestork for all the background. The openings are clogged but there is almost a full bottle of still-liquid inside each of them.
If acids and bases d>
The dried up stuff extends to the very opening. And once the water dissolves that stuff, it will start to dissolve stuff farther into the cap. The caps are those designed to twist maybe a 1/4 of a turn.
I really wanted to use the sink, and even in the tub, my first inclination would be to fill it up only enough to cover the bottles on their side. It doesn't seem like it, but I guess that would be more than two 5-gallon buckets,
I didn't know they made spray versions of toilet bowl cleaner. ;-) It's liquid, meant to be turned upside down and squeezed to get the liquid out.
Do you guys have wives to clean the toilets, so you don't know how the caps work? Perhaps one of the wives could come over and show me how to do this.
I don't think the caps are removeable without ruining them or the bottles. . For children's safety. You have to squeeze the outer layer of the cap (something small kids can't do) to even twist it a quarter turn open, and then you'd have only a small stream. But even the outer layer of the nozzle won't come off without tools. It would be worse yet to remove the whole cap and have the stuff just pour out. So I may have jumped to a conclusion, but I think they made that impossible.
I haven't figured that out yet. One step at a time. But since you raise the question, maybe a rock. Darn, I thew away my softball-sized rocks, and I haven't seen my two spare bricks in a long time. (Left by the previous owner, who didn't leave anything else one would call junk. And they didn't match the house, which is half brick.)
I can't think of anything, other than to go to a stream and bring back a rock.
I definitely appreciate the warning. It might have been vague memories about this that made me ask in the first place.
bob_villa, if you'd had the logical sense or imagination to realize he prob ably didn't have a glass bowl large or tall enough (few people do!) to soak some of those big bottles of cleaners to keep the clogged opening complete ly submerged, which was his objective, then you wouldn't have replied with an asisine, short-sighted answer.
replying to nestork, heather wrote: I have been googling info on toilet cleaners and tubs and cant find anything. You seem to know some things on this and am hoping you can help. I have used Lysol and Clorox toilet cleaner on a tub before and never had issues. I purchased the works for the first time recently and without thinking tonight put it on the tub, put my kids down and returned a hour later. My bathroom smells awful I was worried something had caught fire but that was not the case. I scrubbed it off the tub and the smell is not fading may be getting stronger. Any ideas on if this is from that ? I read the cleaner can possibly eat the tub. Obviously no one will be using that bathroom until I can figure out the problem but thought maybe you had some input. Thanks.
replying to nestork, Holly L Godfrey wrote: Nestork, i.used lysol toilet bowl cleaner on my sinks and bath and although it made them whiter than they've ever been, there is an awful metallic smell coming out of the drains now and it is not going away. I used baking soda and vinegar to try to neutralize it and that has worked well in the past for other odors but not this metallic one. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
Wow, another lazarus post.
Yes, acid in the drains can react with organic slime in the pipes and produce a horrible smell. It happened to me once with the leftover acid after a tile job.
Just run lots of water through and it goes away.
Yes. Stick your head down there and use it like a tampon.
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