Green Cleaning Products You Should NEVER Mix
Posted on 01/12/2015
Avoid Using The Combination of Green Cleaning Products
There are so many products you can make use of in your home without having to rely on the store-bought cleaning products. Home cleaning can be both cheaper and more eco-friendly by using the right green products found in your kitchen cabinets. But, sometimes after witnessing the amazing results which using these products provide, you might get some ideas about making more products yourself. Baking soda and water makes a soda paste that cleans many things. Water and vinegar make a strong all purpose cleaner. Water an lemon juice make a great disinfectant. Okay, well how about you mix some of the stronger products with themselves instead of with water? Stop right there! Before you get any more ideas, here are some combinations you should NEVER do with green cleaning products.
• Baking Soda + (White) Vinegar
This combination sounds reasonable at first, right? Baking soda, as a basic cleaner, can do so much when you are sink or oven cleaning, and vinegar’s acidic properties work wonders for tougher stains and disinfecting. But, unless you want to vulcanise rubber, or make a volcano for a school project, those two should not come together. By mixing baking soda and vinegar, you get sodium acetate. This will make more of a mess than a cleaner you can use. Baking soda is a good enough cleaner on its own, and if you want to mix vinegar with something else than water, use vodka – it makes for a great window and glass cleaner.
• (White) Vinegar + Hydrogen Peroxide
Combining two great sanitizers which do wonders in almost all areas of house cleaning? What could possibly go wrong? Well, everything. The mixture of the two will create peracetic acid. This is a corrosive acid which will eat through your surfaces, can cause skin damage, its vapours can damage your eyes and lungs, and that’s only for the first few minutes. Come to think of it, it might be a better idea to use them separately, right? And as well you should. Vinegar is an awesome cleaner as it is, the combinations you can do with it are enough to take on the hardest stains and to kill all the odours, and hydrogen peroxide is great at disinfecting and thoroughly cleansing surfaces. The latter is also a wonderful tool to completely sanitize the bathroom, so no need to even attempt mixing them. The results of this can be truly devastating.
• (White) Vinegar + Castile Soap
You have a great disinfectant and cleaning tool, and the most organic soap on the market. What harm could possibly come out if you attempt to combine them? Well, actually, there will be no harm. Unless you count the wasted money and products, that is. Together the two of them create... well, nothing. Just a mushy substance. The vinegar dissolves the castile soap and it breaks down to its essential oils, but in a very chunky, gunky way. That is no way to use products such as these. Castile soap is best used in combination with water as its lather can cleanse most stains, and can be used in the washing machine and for the dishes.
Ultimately, you should not be attempting to discover any new cleaning methods when the old ones work so well. You already own most of the products that will see your home clean and shiny, so discover ways of using them and not combining them. As it is in the case of vinegar and hydrogen peroxide, some experiment results can be quite harmful, so do stick to the basics. No need to fix something that is not broken, right?
