How To Clean Yellow Stains From A Toilet Bowl

How To Clean Yellow Stains From A Toilet Bowl

If there was one room in your house that takes up an outsize portion of your cleaning energy, it’s probably the bathroom. For a room that’s dedicated to keeping you clean, it can sure get dirty!

One common (and unsightly) issue that can arise in a bathroom is toilet stains, especially yellow toilet bowl stains. These pesky stains can resist the efforts of traditional toilet bowl cleaners, and leave you scratching your head while you try to keep your toilet clean.

Luckily, Stain Solver has you covered. We’ll go through the causes of these yellow stains, and how you can use Stain Solver to easily remove them.

Let’s get started!

What causes yellow stains in toilet bowl?

There are a few things that might cause a yellow stain on your toilet bowl, but it’s actually very unlikely that urine is one of them.

Urine Stains might cause issues on clothing or other fabrics, but they’re unilkely to get left behind on your toilet, despite how similar in color they are to the stubborn stains that you may be seeing on your toilet bowl.

The yellow staining that you’re noticing is likely something else!

In fact, one of the most common causes of yellow stains in a toilet bowl is hard water. Hard water contains high concentrations of minerals such as calcium and magnesium, which can accumulate in pipes and fixtures over time. When these minerals are present in the water, they can leave a yellowish residue behind on the surface of the toilet bowl.

Another cause of yellow stains is iron deposits, which can occur naturally in well water or because of corrosive metals or plumbing materials that have begun to break down over time.

When these deposits accumulate, they can leave behind a yellow hue on the surface of the toilet bowl. In some cases, this hue may be a sign that bacteria are growing inside your pipes as well.

Finally, yellow stains in toilets may be caused by mold and mildew accumulation beneath the rim or underneath the surface around seals and joints due to moisture build-up from frequent flushing. The growth of mold and mildew can contribute to an accumulation of yellow film on your toilets surfaces.

Okay, now that we know why these yellow stains occur, we can figure out how to get rid of them!

How To Remove Yellow Stains From your Toilet Bowl

Luckily, with Stain Solver it’s not very difficult to remove yellow stains from your toilet bowl. All it takes is a little bit of patience, and a very nominal amount of elbow grease.

Follow these steps and you’ll have a clean toilet bowl in no time! All you need is some Stain Solver and a toilet brush.

Here’s what a toilet bowl in our basement looked like previously:

toilet bowl with yellow stain in center

Not a pleasant sight! These hard water stains were well stuck on there, and our normal cleaning routine didn’t get rid of them.

Step-By-Step Process To Remove Toilet Bowl Stains

Here’s the cleaning method we used to remove the stubborn toilet bowl stains.

  1. Fill the Entire Toilet Bowl with Stain Solver Powder

We used around a cup of Stain Solver and found that it yielded excellent results, but you could use more if you felt so inclined.

stain solver being poured into a stained toilet bowl

Once you see the bubbles forming in the toilet water, you know that the chemical reaction has been initiated, and that Stain Solver is working to clean the stained areas!

  1. Be Patient!

Now you simply have to hang tight and let the Stain Solver do its work. We let the solution sit for three hours, but leaving it up to six hours will further reduce the effort you have to expend to remove the yellow stain.

  1. Use a Scrub Brush to Finish The Job

Once the Stain Solver has had a chance to loose all of the hard water stains and other ickiness on the toilet bowl, you just have to give it the final push it needs to make the stains disappear.

photo of toilet bowl with scrub brush

 

A quick scrub with a stiff bristled toilet brush should remove all of the stains, and get your toilet back to tip top shape.

Here’s what our toilet looked like after all the stains were gone:

To remove the stains from the toilet rim we would use a spray bottle to apply the Stain Solver solution to that part of the toilet.

Other Considerations For Cleaning Toilet Bowls

We’ve found that this is the best way to remove yellow stains from toilet bowls, but there are still some things to be aware of.

First, if you have brown or red stains in your toilet bowl, they’re likely the result of rust stains, which is not something that Stain Solver is good at getting rid of.

In this case we recommend muriatic acid. But this is a MUCH more dangerous chemical than Stain Solver is, and it’s critical to use PPE like rubber gloves when dealing with that sort of cleaning product.

If you’re regularly seeing this sort of staining it could mean that you have very hard water, or even pipe corrosion. If this is the case, we recommend talking to a qualified plumber to see if they can help you get your plumbing fixtures up to snuff.

Finally, regularly cleaning your toilet properly is the best way to avoid this kind of buildup, so make using Stain Solver on your bathroom surfaces a regular part of your routine.

Final Thoughts

Stain Solver is an excellent toilet bowl cleaner, and can be use to whiten surfaces all over your bathroom, and elsewhere in your home as well. Check out our full library of cleaning tips to see how it can help to amplify your best cleaning efforts and make your whole home sparkling clean!

 

Back to blog