Cleaning supplies near toilet bowl in modern bathroom. Space for text
Maintaining an orderly household entails a lot of chores including cleaning your bathroom toilet. Given the important function that it plays in your home, ensuring its upkeep is simply imperative. Failure to take the proper steps of bathroom toilet maintenance could lead you in for some costly plumbing work and repairs.
It’s said that many homeowners tend to make a lot of mistakes in their cleaning routines – bathroom included. Perhaps you’ve mistakenly thought that something you’re doing is good for your bathroom, when in fact, it’s actually doing the reverse?
With that said, here are five of the most common toilet care and maintenance mistakes that you could be making without you even knowing.
It should be a part of your toilet maintenance to make it a household practice never to flush anything else other than feces, urine, and other bodily excrements down the drain. Otherwise, you may end up clogging and damaging your bathroom pipes. This can potentially spell trouble and a situation like this needs expert sewage cleaning services from a-1sewerandsepticservice.com or other local sewer companies in your locality.
Every bathroom needs to have a good working wastebasket to serve as a reliable trash receptacle. This is where you’re supposed to throw wastes that aren’t okay to flush down the drain.
Some of the common, everyday items that some individuals mistakenly flush down the toilet include:
While you may want to strive for a minimalist lifestyle at home, this doesn’t necessarily mean going for an all-purpose cleaner. This may work in other parts of your home, but not your bathroom.
When there are multiple surfaces in your bathroom, you’ve got to use the right kind of cleaners for each one. For instance, your toilet bowl itself will require a stronger disinfectant, as well as your bathroom sink. That way, you can kill whatever bacteria may have accumulated in the aforementioned spaces.
Depending on the tiles of your bathroom, you’ve got to take extra care with the kind of cleaner that you use. Make sure it’s strong enough to kill off the harmful germs living on the surface but won’t leave nasty marks on the tiles after cleaning.
If you look around the shelves of many supermarkets and hardware stores, you’ll notice the heavy presence of many lemon-based cleaning products. It’s said that this is done for a practical reason; lemon smells very good and its odor lingers. So, it’s very effective at masking whatever unpleasant smell may have been trapped inside your bathroom.
But, while you may think it’s a good alternative, the truth is quite the opposite. As much as possible, you should avoid using lemon-based products on your toilet. The acid present in lemons will bring more acidity to an already strong bleach cleaner. In effect, it can wear down the rubber used in toilets and your sink. If left unchecked, they can cause extensive damage that may require remodeling your bathroom space.
Cleaning your toilet brush is believed to be important. But, not everyone actually does this. In between the exhaustion after cleaning your bathroom to being in a rush, it’s very easy to neglect cleaning your toilet brush.
This is a big mistake. Even if you think you’ve killed the germs by using bleach as you clean up, there might be bacteria that lingers within the bristles of your toilet brush. So, you’ve really got to make it a habit to clean up your toilet brush after every use.
It’s not that difficult. All you need to do is to soak the brush in hot water with bleach and leave it there for an hour. Then, rinse it again with hot water, and leave it to air dry.
There are many homeowners who are believed to opt for mixing acidic products with bleach. This is because some may not really like the strong smell of bleach. Some say it reminds them of a hospital room that’s just been cleaned. Hence, mixing another acidic scented cleaner with bleach to mask its odor is quite a common practice.
Doing this is actually more harmful than you think it is. Bleach is already a potent cleaner in itself, so there’s no need to mix it with more acid. Otherwise, you could be creating a dangerous combination, which in effect may give off toxic chlorine gas.
Conclusion
Your toilet is one of the most important plumbing features in your household that you’ve got to be very careful about its care. The last thing you want is to have to undergo a big plumbing re-work because you’ve been unknowingly damaging your toilet rather than maintaining it well.
The thing about plumbing problems is that they’re oftentimes likened to a burglar in the dead of night – they happen when you least expect them to. Now that you’re aware of the possible ways you may have been mishandling your bathroom cleaning, as enumerated above, be mindful enough so as not to repeat them. In enforcing the necessary changes on your cleaning regimen, you can now be sure that you’re taking care of and maintaining your toilet well moving forward.