What do you clean with?

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Permalink Reply by Amy Rose on January 30, 2009 at 11:44pm

Use baking soda in place of Clorox. I lightly wet the tub, then sprinkle on lots of baking soda and rub it in. My tub gets really dirty in between cleanings so I rub it in and let it sit for 1/2 hour. Then I come back and scrub it off with water. It works great, and I haven't noticed that this is any more work than using other products.

The only "cleaning products" in my house are
- Baking soda
- vinegar
- borax
- soap

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Permalink Reply by Jeanette Nakada on February 1, 2009 at 11:32am

Great cleaning practices, Amy.

Several other ideas--
Avoid air fresheners and perfumed product:
open the windows; use baking soda, cedar blocks, or dried flowers as air fresheners.

One all-purpose recipe:
Add to 1 gallon of water any of these:
3/4 tsp liquid soap (anyone know where to get this?), or
1/4 cup of white vinegar, or
1/4 cup borax

Window cleaner:
Make a mixture of 1/2 cup white vinegar and 1 gallon of warm water and use that in a spray bottle.

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Permalink Reply by Rita Corell on February 2, 2009 at 5:38pm

I have attached an article from a newsletter with information from Amy Bond's book, Clean and Green. There are two additions at the end of it on cleaning copper bottom kettles with vinegar and salt (incredibly fun!) and painting concrete with white distilled white vinegar and letting it dry prior to painting to get it to adhere better and get paint all the way into the textured concrete surface. I tried it a couple years ago and it is holding really well.

Here is a file on making rainbarrels too, for fun. If you have a site for rain barrels elsewhere feel free to put it there instead. There was a workshop on rain barrels last summer here where both sets of materials were presented, with water conservation. Both topics work well together.

Enjoy!
Rita

Attachments:

• Rain barrel workshop- green cleaners.doc, 29 KB
• Rain Barrel Article.doc, 39 KB

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Permalink Reply by Doug Boyd on February 2, 2009 at 8:42pm

Vinegar is great on chrome and places where there may be water spots.

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Permalink Reply by Jennifer Rasmussen on February 19, 2009 at 7:21pm

Bon Ami is cheap and environmentally friendly, and it works great on everything.

Also, just to put it out there, we had our wood floors refinished recently. We were told to always clean them with a little bit of white vinegar in water, no commercial cleaners! They said they will dull your floors (and I assume they are all made out of some crazy mix of chemicals too).

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