Equip yourself with facts and tools for getting rid of dirt, limescale and bad odour in your toilet

When it comes to removing limescale, it “depends on the hardness of the water, the frequency at which the toilet bowl is cleaned, and the products used to clean the toilet”.Bacteria – this can often resemble the smell of rotten eggs and is caused by hydrogen sulphide, emitted by bacteria in your pipes, especially in hot weather. White vinegar can be a great tool to help you get rid of all kinds of stains, including limescale, though you’ll also need some serious elbow grease to make the most of it. The acidic values of vinegar allow it to soften limescale and prepare it for scrubbing clean. Pour undiluted white vinegar into your toilet bowl, making sure you get it up under the rim where limescale often gathers and cover every part of the surface. Leave it for three to four hours and then scrub it with a brush. Repeat if necessary. When you’ve finished cleaning the limescale from your toilet, flush to finish.

Domestos toilet gel cleaners get tough with limescale and germs to help give you a brilliantly clean, fresh-smelling toilet – and also kill 99.9% of all germs, dead, even between flushes. The Pink Stuff Paste is made from baking soda, quartz, sodium silicate and soap, which makes a mildly abrasive paste - meaning minimal scrubbing is needed. All you need to do is apply the paste with a soft cloth or sponge, gently rub the surface (ensuring all limescale residue is covered) and rinse the paste off with hot water. Leave it on for longer for particularly stubborn limescale stains. ProMost professional cleaners say that letting the cleaning solution soak into the stains offers the best results when cleaning a toilet or anything else around the home. So, if you really don’t want to use bleach in your loo, leaving a non-bleach alternative to soak in will offer good results as well. If you’re looking for one of the strongest toilet cleaners available in the UK today, these five suggestions should certainly be high up on your shortlist.

Limescale is a hard, chalky substance which is mostly made up of calcium carbonate. It often builds up inside kettles, boilers, and pipework, especially, but not exclusively, where there is hot water. It can also build up on old pipes and other surfaces where ‘hard water’ has flowed, including your toilet bowl. Once it’s there, limescale can be very difficult to remove by scrubbing alone. Some videos show Coca-Cola having incredible results, leaving the toilet bowl as clean as the day it was installed. While others show it as having slightly less effective cleaning power. We like that the bottle is made from 100% recycled plastic and that Viakal is safe to use (as long as you don’t mix it with bleach) as it’s free from ammonia, bleach and chlorine.Some limescale removers have high concentrations of acid, which may damage chrome taps. Before using any limescale remover, we recommend that you read the label and follow the instructions on the bottle. Ecover also never tests its products on animals, and even the bottle is made from recycled and plant plastic.

If the stains are below the water line, the cleaning product will eventually get to them. However, it will be diluted by the water in the bowl, so you’ll want to leave it to soak for as long as you can. Limescale is made of calcium carbonate and is usually worse if you live in a hard water area. Around 16 million people in the UK do, so find out if you’re one of them with this handy map.Yeah, [The] Pink [Stuff] Paste is the key. It'll bring anything up like new!” (Tried and tested by Mumsnet user DonLewis)