Anyway, here's evidence that sometimes fundamentally smart people do remarkably stupid things. This was part of my morning (before going over to work) and more of my afternoon (ended just a few moments ago):
And yeah, after I turned the water back on and let the tank fill up, it flushed normally, so I assume I got all the citric acid out of there. But yeah. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. "Oh, citric acid will break down calcium carbonate ---> more citric acid will be better at it" without making a stop at "wait, how well does citric acid dissolve in water again?" (I should have remembered; I've had it clump up in the teakettle before).
The heck of it is? It didn't even take that much limescale out. Yes, the toilet is much cleaner (And I did pour the boiling water in after it, just in case there was any residual stuff stuck along the way), but there's still a big patch of the tan-colored limescale (fundamentally, it is travertine - or more correctly, I guess, tufa - a calcium carbonate precipitate. In Chickasaw National Recreation Area north of me, there is a creek known as Travertine Creek because of the deposits it has laid down, and our drinking water comes, in part, from the same aquifer that the creek springs from).
But yeah. Sometimes it takes someone kind of smart to actually be really stupid.
I'm just glad I got it out without breaking the toilet OR entrapping my hand in the p-trap.
Edited to add: photographic evidence. This is the vast majority of the plug (you can see how it's curved to match the bottom of the outlet of the toilet). Pinkie Pie for scale. (She is about 1 1/2" tall).
I am very glad I was able to get this thing out of the drain of the toilet without pushing it all the way into the p-trap out of my reach. I would either have had to called the plumber then, or taken the toilet up and try to reach it from the other side.
(I'm also amazed I didn't wind up a sobbing mess on the floor when I first saw it, but sometimes, with true emergencies in my life - and not having a functional toilet is a true emergency - I am good at just gritting my teeth and going "I must fix this somehow" and doing it without any drama. I've also been told I'm frighteningly cool-headed in *genuine* emergencies (like the incident when our building was filling with smoke and I had to call the fire department) but that may be long training of going solo. I will say the "emergency" that freaked me out the most in recent years was that time last year when the guy tried to break down my back door, and before that, trying to find out what had happened to my parents when my dad wound up in the ER after a medication misdosage....but I guess in both those cases I was able to keep a sufficiently cool head until the thing was actually over. In the first case, I cried a little bit and couldn't go back to sleep; in the second one I just sat and shook for like an hour)
2 comments:
Wow. What if... you poured a bottle of vinegar down the loo before you left on break? Would all the calcium carbonate dissolve or would it damage the enamel too?
Non-cola sodas have citric acid (and colas have phosphoric acid) in a more manageable form that works on hard water toilet stains. I buy the generic brand ginormous 3-liter bottle for this purpose. We have really hard water here, so removing the calcium carbonate usually requires some scrubbing with a pumice stone as well, though. I think I picked up the tip from one of those BBC America "How Clean is Your House" episodes.
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