natural cleaning

Slightly strange cleaning tips and tricks

When it comes to cleaning the house, there are the set ways in which everyone seems to get their place sorted. Household cleaners come in various shapes and sizes, but will all contain similar ingredients, and do the same job. If you can break away form these cleaners, then you may well find that you save a lot of money as well as reduce your impact on the environment by reducing the amount of chemicals that you flush into the water table. Essentially, the best way to be cleaning without these chemical cleaners tends to revolve around using natural products that have certain cleaning properties. Lemon and vinegar for instance contain high levels of acid, that eat away at dirt, but tend to be gentle enough to leave most surfaces unharmed. Baking soda is carbonated when wet, which makes the cleaning action more vigorous, adding energy to the chemical reactions involved in breaking down the dirt’s bonds. Cheap cola is also highly acidic and when left for a while can take the rust off of a nail, leaving it shiny, which is great for cleaning, but terrible news for your teeth if you are a cola fan! Have a look through the following tips and tricks that use some outlandish products, and see if there are any that may help you clean in a different way to usual…

In the kitchen, you can replace your surface cleaner with two parts lemon, one part vinegar and dilute if you like. The vinegar and lemon cut through grease, and disinfect surfaces, killing germs on contact. This is a natural and friendly way to get rid of germs that is just as effective as any chemical cleaner.
If you have a lot of limescale clogging up your kettle, then chuck the used up chunks of lemon from other cleaning used into it, and fill the rest up with water so that all of the limescale is covered. Once you have boiled it, leave the solution to do it’s work over night, and you should find that you can rinse the limescale out!
The same technique works for microwaves! If you are tired of scraping about to clean the inside of your microwave, then place a cup full of water and lemon juice in there and cook on high for a minute. The acidic evaporation will degrease the interior walls of the machine, making it really easy to clean!
The bathroom has many areas that are particularly difficult to clean, and one of the worst are the taps! You will find that taping a bag full of vinegar around the tap and leaving it over night will leave your taps easy to wipe clean. They will sparkle extremely easily, as the acid breaks down the limescale, much like the lemon in the kettle!
Baking soda and lemon forms a great cream cleaner for the bath, as does adding vinegar.
Try pouring cola down the toilet and leave it for half an hour before you give it a scrub with a toilet brush and flush it. You should find that it shines up nicely! Use neat vinegar around the surfaces of the toilet as a softer but effective bleach, which will kill the nasty germs about it!
Try pouring vinegar, baking soda and boiling water down a blocked plughole; the fizzy action combined with the acid and heat will shift tough blockages easily!
Baking soda and vinegar with a little lemon on a toothbrush, like toothpaste, will get your bathroom grouting looking great!
Try it today, you will be extremely surprised!

Guest post provided by: http://www.london-cleaners.org.uk/blog/ease-the-pressure-with-alternative-cleaning-methods.html

Microfiber Cleaning Cloths from Ecloth

Microfiber Cleaning Cloths are a revolutionary, environmentally friendly, and extremely effective way to clean. Microfiber cloths are made of tiny fiber which catch and hold dirt, grease and grime and pull it away from your surfaces. There are approximately 200,000 fibers in one square inch of a high standard store bought microfiber towel. Top level microfiber cloths have 1.6 million fibers per square inch and that really makes a difference!

Ecloth is the world’s leading producer of microfiber cloths and have been manufacturing since 1995. Nearly 500 million fiber strands are in each e-cloth resulting in 1,246 miles of e-cloth fibers in each cloth. To put this in perspective, fibers from one e-cloth would stretch from New York City to Minneapolis or Seattle to San Diego.It is e-cloth’s composition (highest quality polyester and polyamide), fiber size (smallest diameter in the world), fiber processing (highest density in the world), that allows e-cloth to outperform all other microfiber and cleaning cloths.

e-cloth’s filaments are so small and so strong; using just water they break up, lift, lock in, and clean deep down into the tiniest grooves and crevices. Dust, grease, oils, grime, dirt and bacteria are quickly and easily removed and locked away deep inside the fibers until the cloths are rinsed or washed.

Surfaces are cleaned so effectively that there is nowhere left for bacteria to grow. Surfaces are left polished and totally smear and lint free. e-cloths rapidly absorb 7 times their weight in water.

In addition, scientific research carried out by world renowned Silliker Group, has proven that e-cloths also remove over 99% of bacteria.

High quality microfiber cleaning cloths feature split microfiber, after the splitting process each fiber towel looks like an asterisk if you’re looking at a cross section. The open spaces in the microfiber created by the splitting process allow it to pick up and hold dirt as well as absorbing liquid.

You can use microfiber cleaning cloths dry as a duster instead of using a cleaning cloth treated with chemicals or a (chemical) spray and wipe method. Split microfiber is positively charged which makes it work like a magnet attracting negatively charged dust particles. This characteristic along with the microscopic open spaces created by the splitting process allow the cloth to attract and hold dirt and dust rather than just pushing it around like a cotton cloth would. Depending on the size of the cloth you may want to fold it. For instance, when using a 16×16 cloth it’s probably best to fold it into fourths. This gives you 8 cleaning surfaces on one towel. When using a smaller cloth, like a 12”x12”, you may want to just use it unfolded like you would use a wash cloth while bathing. Once you’ve collected the dust around the house you can release the dust from the cloth by rinsing it out then you can go on to use the same cloth using the damp method described below.

When used damp, microfiber towels are great for removing smudged dirt, grease or stains. When using the microfiber towels damp, the squeegee like edges of each microfiber in a microfiber cleaning cloth scrape up the dirt while the open spaces keep the dirt in the microfiber towel. You can accomplish all of this with a microfiber towel without adding any chemical cleaners. When using the cloths damp it’s usually best to get it wet and then ring it out. You don’t want it to be dripping as the towel needs to have the capacity to absorb whatever you’re trying to clean off of surfaces. Like with a dry cloth, when using a larger cleaning cloth it’s probably best to fold it to give you multiple new cleaning surfaces on the same towel. This damp method works best for scrubbing bathrooms, cleaning appliances, wiping down kitchen counters, cleaning car interiors and hundreds of other cleaning applications.

The absorbency of microfiber make it great for cleaning windows, even when just using the cloth with water. Microfiber cleaning cloths hold up to 7 times their own weight in liquid which allows them to clean glass while leaving no streaks. This feature also makes them great for cleaning up spills. This will allow you to cut down on the use of disposable cleaning products like paper towels.

Microfiber cleaning cloths are machine washable! When cared for properly you can expect to get several hundred washes out of a single cloth and it will be as effective as it was the day it was new.

Slightly strange cleaning tips and tricks

Microfiber Cleaning Cloths from Ecloth

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