Is There “Poop Soup” in Your Bathroom? Yes, It’s a Thing — Here’s How to Avoid It
First, please forgive me for introducing the phrase “poop soup” into your lexicon.
But perhaps even more offensive than the term is the thing itself. You know what it is, even if you haven’t had the vocabulary to describe it before: It’s the disgusting sludge of water that collects in the bowl of your toilet brush holder. Gross, gross, gross! Yet, is there a more apt term than poop soup? I think not.
The term recently bubbled up in a r/Cleaning Reddit thread titled “Drip dry your brush to avoid ‘poop soup’ in the brush holder.” A picture within the post depicts a toilet brush suspended between the rim of the toilet bowl and the toilet seat so that it can drip dry over the toilet. Redditors, it should be noted, were as horrified by the term poop soup as you probably are. But, mixed in with grossed-out comments, I found some pretty good insight on how to avoid a poop soup build up in the first place.
Here’s what I learned from the advice suggested in the thread:
Use a silicone toilet brush.
Reddit user u/heavymedalist commented, “Just staring at the poop soup accumulate makes me gag. I got a silicone scrubber and liked [that] it didn’t retain water.” This silicone toilet brush has almost 16,000 reviews on Amazon.
Pour bleach in the toilet bowl.
Some people, including user u/abeantoad use bleach to help sanitize the dirty brush before letting it drip dry into the toilet: “I usually pour a bit of bleach into the now ‘clean’ toilet bowl water and let the brush soak in that for a few minutes and then let it drip dry. Just a little bit more sanitized that way!”
Rinse it when you flush.
What better place to wash the toilet brush than in the toilet? Rinse the brush as the toilet is flushing, give it a second flush and rinse, or swish the brush around in the clean water after the toilet’s been flushed. Then hang the brush to drip dry. User u/betweenthemaples describes her process: “Swish it around in freshly flushed water a couple of times, tap off what water you can to accelerate the drying process, then spray with Lysol and let it hang out as long as possible.”
Spray the brush with a disinfectant.
As mentioned above, spraying the toilet brush with a disinfectant after rinsing it and before (or after) letting it dry is another good way to keep your toilet brush as clean as possible.
Use disposable toilet cleaning scrubbers.
User u/lscarn suggests the Clorox ToiletWand Disposable Toilet Cleaning System as an alternative to regular toilet brushes. (Sure, never putting a used brush back into the holder is definitely one way to avoid poop soup!)
Use the tap technique.
User u/bebulis offers another way to dry the toilet brush before replacing it in the holder: “I just hit the brush a bunch of times against each side of the toilet bowl and that does the same trick much faster.”
Personally, I’ve always done the rinse and tap technique and it’s worked pretty well for me. But after following this conversation, I think I’ll start adding the spray-with-disinfectant-step, though. The extra step can’t hurt. How do you prefer to keep your toilet brush and holder clean? Tell me in the comments below. Now to go scour the term poop soup from my brain…