I love to make homemade cleaners but I’ll admit that making simple sprays for general cleaning has been much easier than coming up with a good homemade toilet bowl cleaner. I’ve tried a couple different homemade liquid mixtures for toilet bowl cleaning in the past, but had a continuing problem with the ingredients not staying mixed together. So now I’m taking a new approach – Fizzy Toilet Bombs!

The DIY fizzy toilet bombs are a homemade toilet bowl cleaning tablet that you can just toss in the toilet, let it fizz and dissolve, and then give the toilet a quick scrub with a brush. So far I’ve found it to be a super easy and natural way to get a clean and fresh toilet bowl with minimal effort.

But there is a little bit of trickiness to this recipe. You need to add enough liquid to the dry ingredients so that you have a fizzy reaction when it’s dropped in the toilet – BUT – not so much that things fizz and get sticky and will never dry into usable tablets when you’re making them. I learned through several failed batches to go really easy on the amount of vinegar that’s added to the two other ingredients (baking soda and citric acid). Let’s take a closer look:

How To Make Homemade Toilet Cleaning Tablets

Here are the two little tools that will make this recipe go well for you: a spray bottle and a melon baller. Here’s why . . .

This recipe begins by mixing together a 1/2 cup of baking soda and a 1/4 cup of citric acid. (Citric acid can be found by the canning supplies in stores). Once those are mixed together I add a few drops of essential oils to the mixture too. I like Eucalyptus and Tea Tree for this recipe.

Then, just a bit of vinegar is added to moisten the mixture to hold it together, and to create the fizzing reaction when they are used. This is where you need your spray bottle. You want to add just a couple sprays of vinegar, diffusing it lightly onto the mixture. (If you just pour the vinegar in, it will cause the mixture to fizz too much). I set my spray bottle as far towards a “misting” option as opposed to a “streaming” option too. You will probably only need one or two sprays.

This is also why I like to use a melon baller tool for this recipe. Once I have added the little bit of vinegar, I do a test using the melon baller to form a tablet. I pack some in, and then plop it out onto my hand. If it sticks together, you’re good! You only want enough vinegar added to hold things together and no more. As soon as the mixture holds together in the shape of your tablet, stop adding the vinegar. Again, you will probably only need one or two sprays of the vinegar.

I then use the melon baller to form the rest of the mixture into little tablets to be used as fizzy bombs. I drop them onto wax paper to dry out. They will still expand a bit more and be a little sticky on the bottom before they are completely dry. I usually get about 26 tablets from this recipe.

What Didn’t Work For Me

One of the little tricks I often see for this type of recipe is after the liquid is added, squeeze some of the mixture in your hand to see if it holds together to know if you’ve added enough liquid. When I tried this approach, I ALWAYS used too much vinegar. I’d keep squeezing and squeezing, and thinking, well I guess I need a bit more liquid. Nope! I could never find the sweet spot and always overdid it with this approach. That’s why packing the mixture into the thing I was going to use to form tablets worked much better. If it was holding together in that shape, then I knew that I was good!

I also didn’t have any luck using molds. It was too hard for me to know when things were totally dry, and too hard to get them popped back out of the mold. Once I started using a melon baller instead of molds, the whole process became a lot easier too! (It’s probably possible to use some other sort of small spoon if you don’t have a melon baller.)

Having the tablets all laid out on wax paper also helped me monitor them as they were drying, something I felt I couldn’t do as well when they were in molds. They will expand a bit more and get a little lumpier looking as the drying time goes along. After several hours go by, I move them around a little bit. If they are still sticking a bit to the wax paper, I know they aren’t thoroughly dry yet. It will probably take at least 8 to 12 hours for your tablets to totally dry out. I usually just let them set for an entire 24 hour day to be sure they are good and dry.

Simple and Natural Toilet Bowl Cleaning

So yes, I had to learn from my mistakes, but once I got everything figured out, I found this to be a really simple and natural way to clean the toilet bowl. You can store your fizzy bombs in a jar with a lid, and just toss one in the toilet bowl when you want to clean and freshen it (let it fizz and dissolve, and then give the bowl a quick scrub with your toilet brush).

I’ve always felt like store-bought toilet bowl cleaners are one of the strongest chemicals to have in the house too, so I’m loving that this is a very safe and natural option to have around.

Yes, now that the trial and error is over, I’ve discovered that it’s actually kind of fun to make your own toilet bowl bombs! (printable recipe below)

Related Reading:

• Homemade Cinnamon Sink Scrub
• Homemade Lemon Soft Scrub
• DIY “Spray Before You Go” Poo Spray