Natural Stone Cleaner – Day 18 – 31 Days of DIY Cleaners
December 18, 2015
You usually find hydrogen peroxide in the first aid aisle or in your first aid kit at home, but there are so many other uses for hydrogen peroxide around the home! From cleaning to removing stains hydrogen peroxide is the perfect addition to your DIY cleaning roster!
Let’s start things off with the application that most of you know about already—hydrogen peroxide as a stain remover. It’s a great alternative to bleach, but bonus, it’s not chlorine bleach so I feel a lot better about using hydrogen peroxide. I like to use hydrogen peroxide in a solution of two parts hydrogen peroxide, and one part dish soap. Mix that all together, blot up your stain first, apply this solution to your stain, let it sit for about 5, 10 minutes and then launder it as usual. This solution really helps nab those stains and you can also use it on carpet or upholstery stains.
I don’t know about you, but I’m really not into ingesting pesticides thank you very much. So, a great way to deal with that is to make a solution you of one liter (or one quart) of water, and to that you’re going to add 1 cup of hydrogen peroxide. Dump in the produce that you want to wash, leave it there for a few minutes, give it a good rinse, give it the old pat and dry, and voila! Clean produce, no bacteria and no pesticides.
We get asked a lot about how to clean grout and recently, we had a little bit of a garbage spill at the house—some garbage juice got into a grout line, yuck! Well, there’s a quick solution to clean this up. All you need to do is mix two parts baking soda to one part hydrogen peroxide, get out of cleaning toothbrush, give it a good stir, apply that paste to the affected grout line. Leave it for a few minutes, then give it a good scrub with that cleaning toothbrush. Finally, rinse it really well because the baking soda is going to leave a fine grit behind.
A lot of people use bleach to clean their toilet bowls and this isn’t really a good solution. Why? Because bleach doesn’t actually clean aything—it disinfects and it can help whiten stains—but it doesn’t clean. So why not use hydrogen peroxide instead? All you need to do is pour about a cup of hydrogen peroxide into the toilet bowl, leave it there for a couple of hours, then get your toilet brush out and give it a really good swish in the bowl. Give it a flush and you’re done. What that will do is help break down stains and get rid of any lingering bacteria.
If you’ve ever looked at your toothbrush and gotten a case of the “ewwwws”, then this is what you need to do. Fill a cup halfway with hydrogen peroxide. Take your toothbrush and just dunk it in there and leave it for about 30 minutes. The hydrogen peroxide will make it look and smell better, and of course, will get rid of any bacteria.
Hydrogen peroxide is incredible in the laundry room. The same way you would use bleach, you can use hydrogen peroxide. But frankly, I’d argue that hydrogen peroxide performs even better. Not only does it whiten whites, but new moms who ask me all the time how to deal with baby stains or cloth diaper stains… here’s all you have to do. Take a cup of hydrogen peroxide, add it to the bleach compartment in your machine or just add it to your wash as you normally would with bleach. Hydrogen peroxide has this amazing ability, especially with protein stains, to break the bond between dirt and fabrics. Your stain will loosen up, and it’ll wash out really easily.
If you’re looking for a quick and easy disinfectant in your kitchen, look no further than the friendly brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide. Now, a quick note here: you want to make sure that you test it in a hidden area on any kitchen surface before you actually use it in a wider spread application just to make sure you don’t get any weird discoloration. After all, hydrogen peroxide does technically have the ability to bleach things. So, if you want to use it in the kitchen to disinfect an area—say you’ve got some meat juice on the counter—take some hydrogen peroxide and spray it onto the surface and leave it for about 10 minutes. That will give the hydrogen peroxide the time to do its thing. Then, you want to wipe the surface clean, give it a good final rinse, and the surface will be clean and bacteria free!
