We have a toilet that gets that hard, brown build up on it.  I have to drain the bowl as best I can (turning off the water and flushing it still leaves some water down in it) and spray the devil out if it with a spray like CLR.  I mean it takes multiple, multiple sprays and me whacking on it with a brush or butterknife to get it to break off. 

Yeah, so maybe if I treated it more often it would come off easier!  But here's the odd thing: we do not have this calcification in our other toilet.  We don't have hard water either (although we used to have hard well water).  Our other toilet is not used a fourth of the amount of this toilet, so you would think, with the water sitting in the bowl for longer periods of time, it would be worse in it.  But it stays pristine!   

Does anyone have an suggestions for taming this problem?  CLR-type stuff is not cheap and the fumes are not good for you to breathe.  I can put bleach in the bowel, but it just whitens the deposits; the build-up is still there and the color comes back pretty quick. 

Don't know if this will work for calcium deposits, but have you tried denture tablets? 

Vinegar is cheaper for putting into the water and letting it soak.

For the inside wall area, turn off the water and let it drain out, get a big rag like an old t-shirt, soak it with vinegar and lay it around on the browned area to set on the stains. If it starts to try out use more vinegar, after an hour or so, come back and scrub it good with whatever you can without scratching the toilet surface. I've read a suggestion of using a pumice stone for the tough spots. After it is clean, take your brush and do a quick skirt of soap and scrub once a day and it shouldn't build-up on you. I keep a bottle of old bubble bath that I didn't like, mixed with about 1/2 as much water,  in a dish soap bottle on the back of the toilet for this purpose. I dressed up the bottle by making a little tie-on apron for it. A suggestion on www.flylady.com is to keep a bucket or some other container filled with the soapy mixture and your brush in the water to do a quick scrub. Only takes a couple of seconds to do. There is a caution with this though, if you have small children or pets the bucket of soapy water isn't a good idea. Edey

I use the vinegar treatment and it works. Also, in the "toilet cleaning" section of your local store you can find pumice stones on a stick just for removing the calcium in your toilet...they work great!!!  We fight the "hard water" devil on a regular basis (and we have a water softener unit to boot!!)  I used to use CLR when we lived in the city, but switched to vinegar when we moved to the country (and a septic tank) and it works great.  If you have a Sam's or Costco membership or know someone who does, I pick up two gallons of white vinegar there for less than $4.00 and use it for all my cleaning.

I also use vinegar on hard water stains on dog bowls and on vases and flower pots that I pick up at garage sales........soaking overnite and the hard water marks just dissolve away.  (I "re-bottle" the "soaking vinegar" from the vases and flower pots to reuse it again for the toilet) 

We have very hard water here and I get the hard water ring once in a while. I found a Pumie Heavy Duty Scouring Stick at Lowes for a couple of bucks and when I drain the water out, after having cleaned it to disinfect, I use the pumice stick to scrape the calcium off. It works pretty well and takes no more than a little elbow grease. It's actually pretty easy. It can be used for several different things, but the nice thing is that it is cheap and lasts for a while. Oh, and it doesn't scratch the surface of the toilet, so no scouring marks there either.

Kathy

Thanks, Kathy.  I will make a note to myself to look for it the next time we are at the hardware store.  I would have tried the vinegar method that an earlier poster suggested, but--can you believe it--I was nearly out of vinegar!  Not enough to do the toliet.  Also, the other toilet--the one that doesn't calcify--is down right now until we can replace the guts in it.  So I can't have the only other toliet down for a long soaking in anything. 

Did try the denture tablets (used 6).  It did lighten the stain some, but none of the calcification broke off.  Guess they work better as a maintenance thing.  Either that, or I needed to use an entire box, and that would have been a bit pricey.  Still, they might be good to use down in the very bottom where it's impossible to get all of the water out and so I can't soak the deposits out.  6 tablets in just that section (the rest of the bowl being drained), might get the stains out and/or loosen the actual deposits.