Most people welcome a new cleaning hack, especially if it involves the bathroom. Cleaning the toilet isn’t a fun task and getting it thoroughly spotless can get stinky real quick. However, there’s one hack that many homeowners say gets their toilets cleaner with less elbow grease. It involves emptying your ice tray.
There are experts who recommend putting ice cubes down the toilet whenever it is time to clean.
Toilet cleaning starts with your freezer
This understandably sounds weird. Many people might remember flushing ice cubes down the toilet as a superstitious ritual during the winter months to “summon” a snow day from school. But to clean the toilet? That sounds like just as much as a myth.
But there is a logic to it and many homemakers suggest it. First, let’s get this out of the way and say that ice cubes aren’t being flushed to replace regular toilet cleaner. It’s actually being used to help the cleaner be more effective.
So…how could ice help clean my toilet?
Ice in the toilet bowl acts as a support for the toilet cleaner. Often, toilet cleaner drips down the side of the toilet bowl into the water and down the pipe. The ice allows the cleaner to cling to the bowl and its sides for longer, penetrating filth and disinfecting it more effectively.
Here’s the gist on how it works: first, take a bowl of ice cubes and pour them into the toilet. Make sure you’re not filling it to the brim. Next, take your preferred toilet cleaning solution and pour/spray it onto the ice. Let the mixture sit for about 15 minutes to allow the cleaning solution to cling and disinfect the bowl. After that, use a toilet brush to stir and agitate the ice, ensuring that it is scraping all sides of the bowl. By this time, the ice should have melted enough to flush.
There are additional bonuses to using ice with toilet cleaner. The ice can also act as an abrasive pumice stone in addition to your toilet brush, scraping off mildew, mineral build-up, or other yucky things that could be stubbornly clinging to the bowl. The flushed ice could help clean the pipe similarly, dislodging filth and grime in conjunction with the toilet cleaner on its way down.
Another benefit is reducing odor. Ice is known to absorb smells and could make cleaning a little less smelly. It’s one of the reasons why many restaurants, clubs, and bars put ice in men’s urinals.
Many people who frequently travel and live in an RV also recommend flushing ice down their toilets. This is not just to clean the bowl, but to have the ice jostle and scrape the nasty stuff out of the black tank. While this method’s effectiveness in cleaning a black tank is put into question, critics still say that ice can help reduce smells and keep water in the black tank during hot days.
Final tips (specifically “don’ts”)
If you plan on giving this hack a try, be sure not to overflow your toilet with ice. Along with that, while most forms of ice work (cubes, crushed, or chips), putting larger blocks of ice in the toilet won’t do any good and could clog things up if they’re too big.
It’s also important to use one cleaning solution and not mix a bunch together. Mixing cleaning products together could create fumes that are dangerous to inhale. It’s best to use your preferred cleaner and choose a different one next time if you’re getting the results you want.
