Parts:
FluidMaster Flush & Sparkle – one for each toilet.
HTH 1″ chlorinating tablets. – 5 lbs bottle will last forever!
I’m lazy and don’t want to do more work than I have to. I was a big fan of the bleach pucks you dropped in the toilet tank. They kept the bowl sparkling clean with that slight scent of bleach after each flush and scrubbing the toilets only needed to be done every couple of months and it was a breeze.
Until I started having to replace the rubber flappers!
The bleach would make them corrode and lose the seal and I’d wake up to the Stephen King noise of “ghost flushing”. The resolution came in the form of the Kaboom gadget that would put a small bleach tablet in-line with the overflow pipe and it would ONLY put bleach into the bowl and not in the tank. The problem is that the refills were (are?) brutally expensive.
During an episode of cabin fever, I found myself browsing Home Depot and found the FluidMaster Flush & Sparkle system. It looked cheap, but the refills were $6 each. Was there something else I
could use as a replacement for the expensive refills? I opened the box and looked at dimensions and then headed to the Pool Supply aisle and quickly found that the 1″ pool tablets will fit perfectly inside the F&S housing.
I ended up buying the gadget and installed it at home. Three months later the original cartridge was depleted and the toilet remained remarkably clean. Not spotless, but about “3-4 weeks since cleaning” in pre-bleach time.
Time to cut this thing open!
As it turns out, you can pop the bottom out of the cartridge. It takes some brute force and violence, so you could notch the cartridge to make the bottom cap easier to remove in the future for the refills – or you can go the caveman lazy way like I did and cut open the side of the cartridge (hacksaw, cut down to the seams on each side) and changing/adding a 1″ chlorine tablet will take seconds next time you do it.
While the original cartridge lasted about 3 months, it looked like the chlorine tab was slightly larger than the one I just put in. Given the design, I should be able to stack TWO of these 1″ tabs and see how long they last that way.
The chlorine tabs are $27 for a 5lbs box at Amazon or Home Depot! This should last most households for years.
Have been searching online for weeks for a sustainable solution, this was exactly what I was looking for.
How has it been working for the last 4+ years for you?
Glad to hear it. I actually found that Kaboom (by Church & Dwight) makes a toilet cleaner that is a neater solution. Theirs has a screw-top lid and you drop their tablets in. Or you drop the 1″ pool shock tablets in, or you can smash a toilet tank cleaner tablet in pieces and drop the pieces in.
It’s a little easier to use than to modify the Flush & Sparkle device.
I need to update this post to add the pictures of the Kaboom devices instead.