How To Easily Clean And Remove Hard Water Stains From Any Surface

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Hard water stains will slowly but surely make themselves known. Your otherwise lovely showerhead starts spraying a few streams of water in random directions, like your eye. Soap scum encircles your tub and reddish stains mark the waterline of your toilet. Water doesn't flow as freely from your sink faucets or leaves a white residue in your tea kettle. Hard water residue and stains show up everywhere water touches, and while it's not generally corrosive, it can be messy. Plus, gradually, your plumbing could work less and less well.

If you leave hard water to evaporate, it leaves behind mineral deposits — usually calcium carbonate, but also other minerals that determine its color, from red and pink to whites to brown and black. These minerals – calcium and barium sulfate, magnesium and iron hydroxides, calcium and zinc phosphate – are sometimes collectively referred to as limescale, and they're a pain to clean. But they have an Achilles heel: acids, reacting with the mineral deposits, produce soluble salts that can be easily cleaned away. 

For most surfaces, you probably want to use cleaners that will eliminate hard water stains without also hurting the finish on your kitchen and bathroom fixtures. The old standby is CLR (for calcium, lime, and rust remover), made from mild acids and Tripropylene glycol n-butyl ether. But not every surface lends itself to harsh abrasives. Sometimes, the most effective products might be things you already have on hand for other cleaning tasks, like white vinegar, baking soda, and perhaps borax and hydrogen peroxide. What you should use depends on the surface you're cleaning, since some acid types can be corrosive to certain materials.

Removing limescale from tubs, showers, and toilets really only requires white vinegar and the scrubbing implement of your choice ... a brush, perhaps, or a sponge. When it comes to removing hard water stains from any surface, you'll hear a common refrain: soak and scrub. This is because most products benefit from a brief period of soaking – around 15 minutes is typical — before giving the surface a good scouring. 

Just don't let your cleaner of choice (like vinegar, which provides the best balance between safety and effectiveness) dry out during the soaking. It might be helpful to soak a cloth, paper towel, or sponge in vinegar and cover the stain with that before cleaning, in order to slow evaporation. Products like CLR will have their own specific instructions, which might not follow the soak-and-scrub regimen.

Soap scum around the tub might look worse, but it's simply another form of hard water stain. It forms when the mineral ions that create limescale react with fatty oils from soap to form an insoluble stain, which can be cleaned with any of the usual hard water cleaning options. A chemical-free option might be to use a Powerstone pumice stone toilet bowl cleaner.

Sink bowls are not notably different from tubs when it comes to cleaning hard water stains, but sink faucets and showerheads have a few unique characteristics that make them a bit more challenging to remove limescale from. And it's important to take care of these in particular, because hard water deposits can clog faucets and showerheads, and the problems will steadily worsen and can eventually become permanent.

Using vinegar again, the only other thing you'll really need is a brush ... an old toothbrush will do. Now soak, then scrub, as usual — but the soaking is a bit more challenging, and the scrubbing a bit more focused. You can wrap some fixtures with a vinegar-soaked towel, then wipe away the limescale. You'll occasionally see someone advising you to tie a zipper-lock bag of vinegar around your showerhead, but simply removing the showerhead and soaking it in a bowl or bucket might be simpler, depending on the design. You should be able to remove faucet aerators and soak them in vinegar easily enough. Make sure when cleaning showerhead jets and sink aerators that you really get into the openings with your brush.

Commercial limescale removers like CLR and, reportedly, a little-known cleaning hack with fluoride toothpaste, will also effectively clean your stains. Note that soaking your stains in a large quantity of commercial cleaner tends to drive up the cost of your cleaning.

The best approach for glass that's been stained by hard water usually involves a soak-and-scrub cleaning with distilled vinegar and a microfiber cloth. (You can also clean glass shower doors with muriatic acid.) Vinegar can benefit from a teaspoon or so of dishwashing liquid in your spray bottle. Because glass tends to show hard water stains more than other surfaces, rinse and dry it thoroughly. Many recommend a microfiber cloth for this task, and microfiber is highly absorbent. But perfectly dry microfiber doesn't absorb well, so pre-soak your cloth before using it to dry a surface. 

Sometimes vinegar is combined with baking soda, a mild abrasive, to form a paste that is applied to the stained surface. While you can effectively form a baking soda paste by combining baking soda with water or hydrogen peroxide, don't combine it with an acid like vinegar, since that neutralizes at least some of your cleaning power, depending on the ratio of baking soda to vinegar you use. If you're determined to use both vinegar and baking soda, use them separately by first applying vinegar, allowing that to sit a few minutes, then applying baking soda and allow it to fizz. Finally, reapply vinegar, give it a few minutes, and scrub. This is particularly useful for persistent hard water stains in toilet bowls.

When your "glass" is glassware, however, you should try soaking the stained glasses in warm vinegar before wiping them down and then washing as usual. Which brings us to the peculiar case of dealing with hard water stains on dishes and dishwashers.

Heated drying is a major contributor to hard water buildup and limescale in dishwashers and on glassware and other dishes. It comes back to evaporation, which in this case is aided and intensified by the dry cycle. In the end, it's the soak-and-scrub method again, but there are a few details that make getting limescale off your dishes a bit different, and even easier. One is that you can use the dishwasher itself to do the bulk of the cleaning. 

You might be understandably hesitant to expose your dishes to anything called Tripropylene glycol n-butyl ether, so just put a cup of vinegar (or lemon juice, if you find that more palatable) in a bowl and place it in your dishwasher's top rack. Fill the rest of the dishwasher with stained dishes and run it. If you're lucky, that's all that's required. If stains persist, try also adding a couple of tablespoons of borax to the dishwasher detergent dispenser and running the dishes through a high-heat cycle.

Of course, you can remove limescale from dishes manually. You can get some of the benefits of the dishwasher method by making a paste of borax and vinegar, slathering it on your dishes to soak, then cleaning them with a toothbrush. You can also soak with diluted vinegar, perhaps with a few drops of castile soap to form suds, which hold the cleaner on stubbornly stained areas during the soaking phase.

Stainless steel has a well-deserved reputation for being a bit finicky to clean, and this is true of removing hard water stains as well. It mostly has to do with the characteristics of stainless steel, though, not any difference in the way limescale is handled. Whatever "steel" might suggest, stainless types are fairly easy to damage during cleaning processes, but fortunately it's also easy to avoid problems. Avoid abrasives and chemicals that aren't safe for stainless steel, and prepare a spray of vinegar diluted 50/50 with water, along with a soft cloth or sponge. Full-strength distilled vinegar can also be used if all you're cleaning is stainless surfaces.

After a good soak, the next key to getting limescale off stainless safely is to choose your scrubber carefully. In fact, it's best to not scrub at all, but instead to wipe away your cleaner and dry your stainless steel with a soft cloth. Wipe in the direction of the steel's grain, which helps eliminate smudges and streaks while minimizing the effect of any accidental scratching that might occur.

Helpful products come into play all along the path to a limescale-free home. Because hard water stains are a byproduct of evaporation, getting water cleaned up before it dries goes a long way toward preventing hard water stains. This can be done with just about any appropriate tool, from a squeegee to paper towels, and some professional cleaners have a fondness for waffle weave kitchen cloths.

Of course, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of mineral deposits, or so they say. And if anyone does say it, what they mean is that you'll generally have an easier time of preventing hard water stains than you will removing them. Prevention is a matter of either changing the hardness of your water, as with a whole-house water softener, or by drying surfaces manually to prevent the evaporation that leaves mineral deposits behind. That can be done with a clean microfiber or absorbent waffle-weave cloth. For flat surfaces like shower walls and glass doors, you can often squeegee wet surfaces dry.

Of course, manual drying isn't always possible. In cases like toilet bowls, where small amounts of evaporation are more or less constant, the best approach is to clean frequently, using toilet cleaning stones and gels. And while you can dry your dishes manually, you almost certainly don't want to. Fortunately, there's a super-easy solution here: Rinse aids, including DIY rinses made of vinegar, break the surface tension of water and prevent mineral buildup. Most dishwashers have a built-in compartment for such rinse aids.