h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

One of the first things I used my new washing machine for was descaling my zebra









(People on Facebook will know that there is a life size big picture of a zebra on my shower curtain )

I've a blue shower curtain.... and the first time I washed it, after W moved in, he didn't believe me that I'd put the same shower fcurtain back up.... so... yeh it might have had some soap residue on it - aiming to maybe ditch a shower curtain with our new bathroom, soonish, and get one of those fancy glass door thingies - calcification in our bathroom is mainly on the inside of the windows! and I've no idea how to clean it... they'r etotally covered in limbscale/calcium

There is quite a number of sprays I can buy at my super for descaling tiles, glass doors, faucets and such.

But for descaling shower heads I have found ordinary vinegar to be just as good and way cheaper: I unscrew the heads, put them in a bucket or jar or something and pour enough vinegar to cover whatever needs descaling

Ditto on the vinegar.

Where immerdion isn't practical, I cover with psper towels dampened with vinegar, then a cleaning towel soaked with vinegar on top of that for a long presoak.

Spares one an awful lot of scouring.

I was recommended a very special block consisting of a lot of small pieces of broken glass glued together. With it you can remove the brown streaks in the toilet bowl by scouring them gently. Oddly enough without scratching the porcelain. And the stripes have not come back again even after many moons

I can see how that might work if the glass in the scouring block is a softer formulation than that in the glaze in the porcelain, but harder than limestone.

Myself, I generally use a pumice stone, a natural, foamed, rhyolite glass.

Without the foam, generated by sulfur content of the clay-bank being drawn into the subduction zone feeding the volcano, it would be obsidian.

In every obsidian formation I've ever seen, the obsidian alternates with layers of pumice.

I remember my late mother using pumice stone