Tackle Hard Water Stains And Baked On Grease With 2 Simple Ingredients | One Good Thing by Jillee

I fear I am becoming like the dad from the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. You know, the guy who goes around spraying everything and everyone with Windex, and claims that it’s the cure for everything!

My dad believed in two things: that Greeks should educate non-Greeks about being Greek, and every ailment from psoriasis to poison ivy can be cured with Windex.
– Toula Portokalos, My Big Fat Greek Wedding

While I may have the same enthusiasm as the Windex-loving dad from the movie, my cleaner is of the homemade variety. The “miracle cleaner” that I use for everything from grease to hard water stains.  I’ll be sharing with you today is simply a combination of two natural cleaning ingredients – baking soda and hydrogen peroxide. Baking soda is a natural abrasive that’s great at whitening and deodorizing, and hydrogen peroxide is incredibly useful for disinfecting and sanitizing all sorts of things. Mix these two powerhouse ingredients together, and you’ve got one “miraculous” cleaner!

Related: The Countless Uses For Baking Soda

Kitchen & Bathroom “Miracle Cleaner”

You’ll need:

• Baking soda
• Hydrogen peroxide
• Small bowl

Directions:

This isn’t really a recipe per se, so I’ll just describe how I usually do it. I start by sprinkling about 1/4 cup of baking soda in a small glass bowl or ramekin.

Next, I grab my trusty spray bottle of hydrogen peroxide and squirt some into the bowl. You just want to get the baking soda wet enough so that the mixture forms a nice paste.

Then I scoop up a bit of the paste, and rub it on the offending dirt/stain/grease…whatever! I usually just use my fingers, but I’ve also applied it with the scrubby side of a sponge, too.

You may want to use gloves, but I don’t usually bother. As a matter of fact, the baking soda provides a nice exfoliating effect on my hands, so they usually feel softer after using this cleaner. A nice added bonus! :-)

How To Use My “Miracle Cleaner”

This cleaner is incredibly versatile, and I’ve used it to clean all sorts of things in both my kitchen and my bathrooms. Here are a few of the ways I’ve used it recently.

Related: 30 Uses For Hydrogen Peroxide You’ll Want To Know About

Cookie Sheets and Grease Stains

What is it about those greasy stains on your cookie sheets (or baking sheets, or jelly roll pans, or whatever you happen to call them) that makes them so impossible to clean?

The reason for this is pretty interesting. The baked on oil is made of the same stuff that makes a well-seasoned cast iron pan smooth and nonstick. When heated, the oil combines with the porous surface of the pan (which is why its totally cool to use dish soap when you wash your cast iron, because that stuff doesn’t budge under regular cleaning). This process is called “polymerization”. The fat molecules in the oils bond together and create that smooth surface we know and love.

But what is beautiful and desirable in one kitchen tool, isn’t on another. While dried oil won’t hurt you, it’s unsightly and most people want to get rid of it.

I swear, before I tried my “miracle cleaner” on them, I had probably tried every store-bought cleaner in the cleaning aisle at least once. But those stains simply wouldn’t budge!

I scoured the internet for a homemade cleaner or hack that would help me defeat the grease stains, which were quickly becoming my nemesis. Lemon juice, white vinegar, borax, Castile soap, soaking it in warm water and dish soap, and good old-fashioned elbow grease.

I even tried toothpaste, the thought being if whitening toothpaste can get rid of coffee stains, surly it can do something about this.

But no.

Chemistry to the Rescue

Baking soda are baking powder are both leavening agents while baking (they make your cookies and biscuit light and fluffy).

One is also used for cleaning and deodorizing, the other is not. Baking soda (also known as sodium bicarbonate) is a base. Combined with water, it creates an alkaline or base solution with a pH level of about 8.3.

Add an acid to it (like hydrogen peroxide) and you get a chemical reaction that releases Carbon Dioxide, which will break apart the molecular bonds that make up the stubborn stains we know and love.

But I eventually put my cleaner to the test. I made my trusty baking soda paste, and as they say, a picture’s worth a thousand words!

As you can see, the greasy stain is almost completely gone. There is a bit of remaining discoloration on the pan, but that’s not a problem for me. It just looks like I use it regularly, which I do! I don’t mind having my pots and pans look used, as long as they’re clean, you know?

Hard Water Stains

If there’s one common struggle that every Utahn deals with, it’s our hard water. Our water here is high in minerals like calcium, magnesium, and others, which isn’t inherently a bad thing. However, it does create problems, like hard water stains on dishes and laundry, and mineral buildup and limescale around sinks and faucets.

You can get a water softener, which does help the taste quite a bit, but does little for the overall cleaning quality. Especially with glass and reflective surfaces. My glass shower door still looked like it was caked with hard water spots, my glasses would come out of my dishwasher looking worse than when I had put them in, and my granite countertop never really felt as smooth as I would like.

Before, I started adding vinegar to each load of dishes to help combat our hard water, nearly all of our dishes has unsightly hard water stains. Especially my plastic cooking utensils! Now that I know about the vinegar trick, I don’t usually have to worry about it, but sometimes I forget to add the vinegar and the hard water deposits come back in a flash.

It occurred to me a couple of years ago to give my “miracle cleaner” a try, and it worked better than I could have hoped for! I scooped the paste onto the utensils, gave it a good rubdown, and rinsed. The white buildup melted away, and my utensils came out looking like new!

Bathroom Faucet & Sink

So while I was thoroughly convinced of my cleaner’s power in the kitchen, I hadn’t thought to use it elsewhere in my house. That is, until I needed to address my bathroom sink.

I swear, I clean my bathroom sink on a fairly regular basis, but after awhile, makeup and hairspray seem to combine to form an almost impenetrable film on the faucet, in the basin, and around the sink itself (not to mention the aforementioned hard water stains on any glass surfaces and ceramic tile). And heaven forbid I look at the water spout or shower head. The lime scale buildup is scary.

It was about this time that my trusty cleaner came to mind, and I decided to give it a try. Like the baked on cookie sheet oil, the baking soda and hydrogen peroxide combination dissolved minerals without scratching the surface of my stainless steel fixtures.

And at this point, I wasn’t terribly surprised that it worked like a charm! That gunky film of makeup and hairspray didn’t stand a chance.

And the soap scum and pesky calcium deposits around the faucet and sink were just as easy to tackle! I used a toothbrush to get the cleaner right into the nooks and crannies of the sink, and it turned out looking cleaner than I remember it looking in a long time! So sparkly. :-)

Toilet

One place we always seem to forget when it comes to hard water stains is the toilet. But they are a big deal, even (and especially) for a porcelain surface that is constantly coated with water.

Hard water stains on a toilet are pretty easy to spot even though you can’t see the tell tale white outline of every water spot.

Hard waters stains on toilets are characterized by a grey, rust, yellow, or brown colored ring around the toilet drain. Unlike traditional water stains, which consist mostly of the minerals found in your water, toilet bowl stains create a rough surface for more minerals and other types of deposits to hold onto. And because of the porcelain surface, you don’t want to be scratching that surface with steel wool or other harsh abrasive cleaners that may damage the surface, which will only make the problem worse overall.

The oxidation process of baking soda and hydrogen peroxide is gentle enough to keep your toilet fresh and clean, without scratching it. Ideally you’ll give the toilet a good once over at least once a week while you’re quickly cleaning the bathroom, but when that isn’t possible it’s time to do a deep cleaning.

Turn off the water supply to your toilet, empty the bowl by dumping a large bucket of water down it (don’t flush, that will only release the water from the tank into the bowl, and you want that for a good rinse), put on your rubber cloves and start working that “miracle cleaner” into the stains with the toilet brush. Just like the cookie sheets, the stain will be gone in no time.

And if you are dealing with an unsightly rust stain around each of the water jets in your toilet, (which you are if you have hard water), head over to this post and learn how an overnight vinegar soak can eliminate them from your life.

…And More!

I haven’t tried out this cleaner on every surface of my house, but I’m sure there are nearly limitless different ways you could use it. Let me know if you’ve used this cleaner in other areas around your house, and how it went! Or if you haven’t tried it yet, give it a try and let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear from you! :-)