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No one flushes with excitement when it’s time to clean the toilet, but it’s an unavoidable task if you want to make sure your bathroom looks its best, as well as to keep bacteria from building up inside the bowl (and then spraying out into the rest of your bathroom with every flush).
It takes a bit more time and effort than a casual spray of Gatorade-colored cleaning fluid and a stir with a flimsy brush you grabbed at the corner store to get the porcelain sanitized and sparkling, but with the right tools and a few useful tips, it’s a task you can complete easily enough. Frequent cleaning greatly reduces the ick factor, too, so it’s a chore you should stay on top of.
Depending on the brand of bowl cleaner you’re using, this project should take only about 15 to 20 minutes. Some cleansers’ instructions recommend letting the solution sit for up to 10 minutes, but you can work on wiping down the exterior parts of the toilet while you let the disinfectant do its job.
There’s more to a toilet brush’s design than most people realize. Although the tool’s main job is to make cleaning your toilet easier—meaning, it has a head that’s shaped to reach all areas of the bowl and bristles that are firm enough to scrub but not flick toilet water (and … other things) everywhere—it should also be convenient and sanitary to store, and easily replaceable.
We like the OXO Good Grips Compact Toilet Brush and Canister. Its handle was comfortable for our testers, the replaceable brush head makes for consistent scrubbing performance, and the clever clamshell stand does a great job of hiding the brush away discreetly when you’re not using it.
For the toilet bowl cleaner to do its work in sanitizing the porcelain, it needs to be undiluted, so you have to drain the water in the toilet. You have a few ways to accomplish this, but the easiest and quickest I’ve found is to fill a bucket or empty storage bin with about a half-gallon of water and quickly pour it into the toilet, aiming toward the back, where the water leaves the bowl. This step will trigger the flushing action and drain the water out without new water filling in from the tank.
Start at the top of the bowl under the rim and apply around the circle, letting the cleaner drain down the sides. Some cleaners come in bottles with an angled spout that makes this task a bit easier, but squeezing out the fluid still requires quite a bit of hand strength. If that’s an issue for you, aerosol sprays might make this step a bit easier. If you’re trying to get rid of more stubborn stains, let the disinfectant rest for up to 10 minutes.
Using your brush, scrub firmly to make sure you’re lifting any particularly stuck bits of gunk from the surface, but to avoid splatter, keep the brush’s head inside the bowl as you work. Be sure to get under the lip and down into the drain. Then it’s time to rinse, and luckily toilets have a built-in feature for this—just flush! (And as is the case any time you flush, be sure to close the lid beforehand to avoid a “toilet plume.”)
Using either disinfecting wipes or a combination of disinfecting spray and a rag, paper towels, or a sponge (that you reserve just for this task), wipe down all of the external surfaces of the toilet, paying special attention to any areas you touch regularly such as the seat and the flushing handle. You can also use an old toothbrush to scrub hard-to-reach places like the toilet seat hinge, but make sure to mark the utensil clearly for its purpose and keep it far away from any other toothbrush in the house to avoid any confusion during your morning routine.
When you’re done with the toilet brush, spritz the head with disinfecting spray, let it sit for a minute, and then rinse it with just hot water in the bathtub or shower. Also, be sure to spray down the toilet brush basin with your disinfectant to make sure nothing festers inside the nooks and crannies there.
We don’t recommend using tank additives, those tablets or discs that can turn your toilet water so blue, it looks like a Smurf is slowly decomposing in your tank. These discs seem like an easy and maintenance-free option, as they’re designed to be dropped into the tank, where they dissolve over time, spreading disinfectant around the toilet bowl with every flush. But according to James Walsh, vice president of product management for toilet manufacturer American Standard, the reality is more complicated. “We do not recommend using in-tank cleaners because they will void your warranty,” he told us during an interview. “They will attack the working tank trim in the tank itself.” Basically, such tablets turn all the standing water in the tank into a caustic liquid, which can warp the rubber components required to keep the flushing mechanisms functioning. Over time this can lead to leaks and occasionally prevent the toilet from flushing entirely.
We also don’t recommend using disposable toilet-cleaning wands, which are an environmentally wasteful (and expensive) way to get the job done. In addition, we’ve found that toilet brushes with silicone bristles are too soft to scrub well.
Cleaning a toilet is an unappealing task, but if you make a regular routine of it, the work becomes much lighter. As someone who has been told, “Your apartment seemed really clean, except your bathroom looked gross,” I’ve learned the value of staying on top of this particularly crappy chore.
James Austin is a staff writer currently covering games and hobbies, but he’s also worked on just about everything Wirecutter covers—from board games to umbrellas—and after being here for a few years he has gained approximate knowledge of many things. In his free time he enjoys taking photos, running D&D, and volunteering for a youth robotics competition.
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