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by KhanMahGretsch 3047 days ago
Baking-soda and vinegar lays waste to bathtub stains in a way that can only be described as brutal! 10-min soak and scrubbing with those tiny crystals makes it brand-new.
4 comments

Tell me about it! My boyfriend had a nasty shower situation going on. He would try to clean it, even going so far as using Ajax / Comet type stuff, nothing would touch it.

After researching and stumbling across vingegar:Dawn and baking soda idea, I tried it on his tub. Honest to god, the grime came off like a banana being peeled. At this point, I stopped using commercially available house cleaners. They don't work as well, and are chemically more hazardous. One year later, I still have a cleaning boner from that cleaning session.

Apparently there is something called cleaning vinegar that has 10% acetic acid. Food grade vinegar is only 5%. I only can dream of the grime removal the 10% strength vinegar can accomplish.

My girlfriend and I purchase the 10% vinegar. It’s available in large jugs, too. Can confirm. It, baking soda, and sometimes a little table salt if you need abrasion, works wonders.
I don’t get the mixing of baking soda and vinegar: won’t that neutralize the solution (actually I read that the soda will buffer it slightly alkaline.) so what’s the purpose of mixing the two?
Agreed. Many natural cleaning solution lists them together, though. Are we missing something. I would think that each would be more effective alone.
I don't understand the underlying chemical reaction, but the vinegar:Dawn mixture alone did not get the boyfriend's tub clean. I had let the mixture sit in the tub for like an hour too periodically doing test scrubs. It wasn't that it wasn't working, it was that scrubbing wasn't clearly only doing a half job.

Once I added the baking soda, like I said in a different post, the grime came off like a banana peel with much less effort on my part.

the salts formed by mixing the 2 are abrasive. but thats it.
I really like the results of bathroom cleaning with vinegar but I end up with a very raw-feeling throat and sore eyes afterwards. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong.
What temperature water are you using? (Do you see where I’m going with this?)
You’re not messing with bleach right...
Oh, no. Just vinegar and water. It does wonders for soap scum in grout. My guess is that I'm getting the inflamed mucous membranes from the low PH vapor coming off the vinegar...
Baking soda is great for cleaning pants too. Just boil some water with baking soda in it and everything stuck to the pan is taken off. In extreme cases you can add some peroxide.