There really is amazing cleaning power in this jug! It even could be considered stupendous… Life changing?… well, I suppose… Yes, it is life changing… So what is all the hoopla about?
Just simple ole white vinegar!
Available at your favorite grocery store, Target, and Walmart. It’s natural and it’s cheap! This 1 gallon jug of vinegar is about $2.48 at Walmart. Compared to Limeaway, which is $3.98 for a 22 oz. container. That’s 1.9 cents an ounce for the vinegar, and 18.1 cents an ounce for the limeaway! What is that like 10 times more expensive?! And Limeaway is NOT natural like vinegar. I wouldn’t want to breath the vapors from Limeaway. Let me put it this way, you wouldn’t make pickles with Limeaway, that’s for sure!
So, as you may be doubting the actual cleaning power of vinegar, you may be asking, “But what can vinegar really do?”
The answer is, vinegar can do a lot of cleaning… from sanitizing your raw veggies and lettuce to deodorizing odors and pet urine, as well as dissolving lime and hard water build up… and the list goes on. I could write a post every week probably for a year on the uses of vinegar, but let me show you one thing I used it for the other day that actually saved me a lot of money.
In the winter months we run a humidifier to keep the air healthier in our home. It has 2 papery fabric type filters that wick the water up and a little fan that blows across them releasing the moisture in the air. It’s a pretty simple design. But we have hard water. Even through the water softener, enough minerals sneak through that halfway through the season, those filters that have been wicking up the water get encrusted with the lime build up and they are no longer able to do their job of wicking up moisture to be released into the air.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so here they are after a month or so of working in the humidifier:
In the past, we’ve just thrown them out and ordered new filters, thinking they were destroyed with the hardened lime.
For some reason though, this year, (maybe it’s because I’m older and wiser?) I finally thought, heck, why not try vinegar, after all what do I have to lose?
I glugged some white vinegar in with the running water in the extra sink in the kitchen… I’d say I used about half the jug, so about $1.98 worth. I probably didn’t even need to use that much.
It immediately went to work.
It was an effervescent experience! The bubble, sizzling and cleaning going on in our kitchen sink was amazing and all I did was stand there trying to get pictures fast enough before the vinegar dissolved the lime.
Within just a couple of minutes, if even that long, all the lime and buildup was completely dissolved and gone.
Wow! I think that $1.98 saved me over $30.00 per filter change! That’s over $60.00 savings for this last winter!
Another good thing about cleaning the filters with vinegar, is next fall when we get the humidifier back out and the filters wick the water up and the fan blows that moisture out into the air, I know that it’s not also blowing some sort of caustic cleaning chemical into my house… it’s good ole white vinegar, a natural sanitizer and cleaner.
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This post is linked up at: DIY by Design