How to clean with Strong White Vinegar: 10 non-tox swaps
10 non-tox vinegar swaps to ditch nasties from your home
White vinegar for cleaning is a darling in natural home keeping circles – and for good reason. It’s versatile and safe! Figgy & Co. strong white vinegar is 9.9% acetic acid which is double the strength of typical supermarket vinegar at 4%. You can safely use it as a natural sanitizer all around the home, especially in the kitchen and bathroom. It can be used neat or diluted with water – which is perfect for having one product help out with multiple jobs.
How to clean with white vinegar in your home cleaning routine:
Continuing to use vinegar today as a cleaner makes more sense than ever – hands down safe and effective, newly synthesized chemicals will never have the same safety record. Vinegar is hypoallergenic and free from irritants like preservatives, dyes and fragrances. Check out our list of 10 simple ways to incorporate vinegar in your natural cleaning routine. You can easily ditch several toxic cleaners with just this one product!
10 non-tox swaps with cleaning vinegar
1. Shining glass, windows and mirrors: Regular glass and mirror sprays are a cocktail of volatile ingredients linked to lung damage—they are loaded with solvents and smear reducing chemicals that evaporate quickly to leave a dazzling fast dry. But what that means for you is your home is now full of these evaporated volatile gasses. They are floating around your home and in your next breath. Yuck!
By-pass all that and dilute Figgy & Co. Strong white vinegar, 1/3 vinegar with 2/3 water and store in a trigger bottle. Spray then buff glass with a lint free cloth or scrunched up newspaper.
2. Shining stainless steel: Regular Stainless steel sprays are similar to glass cleaner and also full of the same volatile ingredients that off-gas into your home, polluting your air. Let’s do better. Dilute Figgy & Co. Strong white vinegar, 1/3 vinegar with 2/3 water and store in a trigger bottle. Spray then wipe benches and appliances in the same direction as the metal grain. A Eco cleaning cloth give a streak free finish and works well for this
3. Dishwasher rinse aid: This is such a healthy swap to make! The surfactants in regular rinse aid that stop the water from beading have been linked to gut issues like leaky gut and asthma. Instead dilute Figgy & Co. Strong white vinegar with equal parts water, use this in the rinse aid reservoir.
4. Water spots on shower glass: Water spots are caused by the minerals in tap water. then bead then dry, and when the water evaporates away it leaves the minerals it was carrying. The great thing is vinegar can dissolve these minerals off your glass and now you can sweep them away. Spray clean glass with undiluted vinegar and leave for 30minutes. Give the glass a scrub with a stiff brush or glass safe non-scratch glass cleaning pad (3M or Scotch-brite)
5. Odour eater for washing: The hygiene washes that you can get at the supermarket are all kinds of not a good idea. They use a class of chemicals called QUATS—these target odours by killing microbes like bacteria in your washing. But this antimicrobial action has been linked to anti-biotic resistant bacteria…. AKA superbugs. Which is terrible. But worse, these QUATS are also sensitisers, which means with more exposures overtime you have a chance having an allergic reaction to them. Gross!
Here’s what to do instead. Use vinegar! Vinegar works well because it kills bacteria that cause odour. Add washed items to a bucket of hot water with ¼ cup strong white vinegar. By using a bucket you are getting a higher concentration of vinegar for the germ fighting. The is best for robust textiles only. Otherwise you can use vinegar in your rinse cycle, as often as you like because vinegar won’t cause superbugs or make your allergic!
6. Compost bucket: If you are a food scrap composter you need to be saluted! Waste food going to land fill is one of the major causes of methane—a climate chaos activator—being released into our atmosphere. But the thing is compost buckets can easily get more than a little bit feral and the pong is real. The last thing we would want is you giving up your good work because the natural break down smells are invading your kitchen!
So, if your inside collection bucket is getting a bit whiffy, spray with diluted vinegar—for ease just use your glass cleaner spray! Vinegar works because it controls the bacterial and fungal odour by killing the microbes or keeping numbers and their smell under control.
7. Fabric softener: Regular softener coats your fabrics in clingy surfactants to make them feel soft—this coating makes towels and tea-towels less absorbent. It also makes textiles more combustible, in a house fire this would mean PJs and bedding burn more quickly, but also clothes in a dryer are more likely to catch fire too. Beyond these dangers are the heavy fragrances—linked to mucking up hormone messaging in our bodies—regular fabric softener is best avoided completely.
Vinegar as a fabric softener has been used for as long as soap has been used in the laundry. Soap can to bind with water minerals in the wash in areas with higher water mineral content, over time this can make clothes feel a little stiff. Adding white vinegar to the rinse breaks this down by dissolving the minerals allowing them to rinse away. Read our blog on Vinegar Vs Fabric softener
8. Wool washing: Wool fibres under the microscope have little scales on them. Wool is a protein based textile that responds differently to changes in pH levels—with scales flat and smooth or at times scales up and scratchy. Washing with soap which is an alkaline cleaner does a great job and will gently clean, but the higher pH sometimes makes the wool feel scratchy after washing as the fibres have been fluffed up. A final rinse with vinegar balances the pH and settles and smooths the fibres. How cool is that! For hand washing, add a few tablespoons to the rinse water. Read our washing woollen blankets blog
9. As a sanitizer in the kitchen: Vinegar is an effective sanitiser against a range of common household microbes, giving you the balance of hygiene without overloading your home with toxic chemicals. Vinegar is used to preserve food because it kills bacteria that cause spoilage, leaving the food safe and edible. Harness this food-safe power in your kitchen by using vinegar for hygiene and to reduce microbes in germy hotspots. Studies show us it’s not only the acidic pH of vinegar but also its organic acid properties that do the work on controlling germs.
The key is to use at least 6% vinegar solution by making a solution of 2/3 Figgy & Co strong white vinegar and 1/3 water in a trigger bottle. The other is to get some contact time on the surface you are treating. Anywhere from 5-30 minutes will have a good affect. If you think the area is germier that regular spots and the surface can tolerate an acidic cleaner then aim for more time and a higher concentration of vinegar to intensify the germ killing action.
10. As a cleaner & sanitizer in the bathroom: Bathroom cleaners are known for their harshness—formulated to fight bacteria, mould and build-up they will leave you will stinging eyes, sore hands and a tickly throat if you get too close. Luckily those bathroom horrors are behind you now. Phew!
Similar to using vinegar in the kitchen, a vinegar base spray also works great in the bathroom and toilet. Again dilute down to 2/3 vinegar and 1/3 water & store in a labelled spray bottle. You can also add 10-20 drops of antimicrobial Essential oil to further enhance the spray if you are keeping mould in the shower at bay—tea tree is a good choice.
Spray in the shower with good contact time regularly to keep mould growth under control in winter. Use in the vanity sink on soap scum—spray, wait a minute or two then wipe. This is also a great spray & wipe for toilet training messes and to freshen up under the loo seat and floor between deeper cleans.
How you wouldn’t use vinegar in home cleaning
1. Electronic screens: Instead use a diluted soapy water and a lint free cloth to buff.
2. Surfaces that react with acid: This includes tile grout and natural stone bench tops. Over time acid based cleaners will cause micro-pitting on stone bench tops causing dulling.
3. Mixed with baking soda: We often see DIY recipes calling for baking soda and vinegar in the same recipe, to be mixed and stored for later use. Mixing these ingredients has an immediate reaction, they fizz and neutralise each other—leaving salts and water. This has cancelled the individual cleaning ability of both the baking soda and the vinegar. It is best to use these separately or mix like this when it is the fizzing action you are wanting to use. For example as a drain refresher for the kitchen sink—though in this case washing soda and vinegar are a better mix!
4. Mixed with soap: Soap and vinegar are opposites on the pH scale which runs from 1 to 14. Soap has a pH of 10 and strong white vinegar a pH of 2. When used together vinegar destabilizes the soap by dropping its pH. This makes the soap revert back to it’s base ingredients and you are left with an oily sludge – and definitely no longer a cleaning powerhouse. Stick to using soap and vinegar separately and keep in mind the old rule of, washing with alkili (soap) and rinse with acid (vinegar).
Figgy & Co. Strong White Vinegar is ideal to have in your cleaning cupboard
1. Double strength. This means you can choose to use it diluted down to regular strength or undiluted for jobs that need a bit more oomph without the burden of harsh chemicals. Regular supermarket white vinegar is 4% acetic acid, Figgy strong white vinegar is 9.9% acetic acid, this is also known as pickling strength. To dilute our vinegar down to regular strength simple add 1.48L of water to 1L of strong white vinegar
2. New Zealand made and naturally brewed. Vinegar making happens two ways these day – the traditional way and the new industrial way using petrochemicals as inputs. Naturally brewed means making vinegar using the traditional way thousands of years old. The natural process is where firstly a sweet liquid is brewed to make alcohol (like grape juice to wine), then the alcohol is fermented with oxygen and vinegar making bacteria (like when wine is left open to the air and it goes ‘off’). Simply put sugar to alcohol, alcohol to vinegar
3. Versatile all around your home. With the option of diluting or not, you will find a use for our white vinegar all around your home. Why not keep some neat in the laundry or under the kitchen sink and dilute the rest to have a handy spray cleaner on hand for windows, mirrors, grimy spots and rinse aid.
Just how long have we been using vinegar?
Vinegar & people have such a long history. It can claim an astonishing 7000 years of human use and counting! In a time of not knowing if a modern cleaning agent is safe to use or not, vinegar well and truly stands out of the crowd as tried and trusted.
Records of its use stretch back pre-Babylonian times, when Ancient Sumerian people discovered that ‘soured’ or off alcohol, like wine that had been exposed to air, gave a new and very useful tool, vinegar. They found vinegar could stop food from spoiling, which in a time before refrigerators was lifesaving. From this beginning spans an amazing history of vinegar being used for preserving food, as a health giving medicine and, as a cleaner.
“I just love using this product for my windows and tap wear, it’s also great for disinfecting my benches”
Monique, product review 2022
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