Fifty Shades of Brown

5
1297
what a blocked sewer chamber looks like

Being a plumber and a mum I have seen many shades of brown. It’s part of the job. The problem with brown effluent, no matter its shade, is that it stands out on white porcelain. I’ve always wondered why toilets are white. However, I must admit, I do like a clean, white, shiny toilet where the bowl is free of skid marks and rust.

 

How do you keep your toilet bowl clean consistently? The obvious answer is to clean it regularly but what happens when you start to get a brown mark that stubbornly won’t brush away?

 

I have been told of a number of different remedies that fight such stains. I haven’t needed to use any of them because I live in a fairly new house and my previous house had water pipes run with copper and I will explain the significance of this later.

 

Some of the remedies I have heard are

  • Pour a litre of coke in the bowl and let it sit overnight, scrub and then flush
  • Drop a denture tablet into the bowl and let it sit overnight, scrub and then flush
  • Squeeze Whitening toothpaste on the toilet brush and scrub as needed
  • Bleach – although I have been told it only ‘whitens’ the stain, but doesn’t completely get rid of the marks

I’ve also written about using toilet bleach crystals that can work on stubborn stains.

Depending on how old your house is and what type of pipes are run throughout your house can also have a significant impact on the colour of your toilet bowl. If the water pipes in your house are run in Gal steel (silver pipe) those stubborn stains at the bottom of the bowl aren’t skiddies, but in fact rust and sedimentation from the gal pipes.

 

Gal pipes are no longer used when running water lines in newer houses because copper and plastic are cheaper to install, cheaper to buy and they don’t rust – hence why I have never had a brown toilet bowl.

 

After many years of water flowing through gal pipes, the orifice in the pipe gets caked with a rust sediment which can slightly colour the water and when this water sits in a toilet bowl, this is what causes the bottom of the bowl to look a terrible shade of brown.

 

Generally, you can’t see the brown in the water even when you drink it through your taps or when you bathe. The only way to combat brown scud marks at the bottom of the toilet if you have gal pipes is either replace all the gal piping in the house (which is an expensive and labour intense exercise but if you are renovating, it’s worth it!) OR replace the toilet bowl every couple of years as soon as the marks start to become unbearable to look at.

At the end of the day, it is still a toilet with a sole purpose of flushing effluent away. I’m sure it’s seen more than fifty shades of brown… just depends if you can stand seeing them too!