Last week it was the refrigerator, this week it was the stove. The stove top gets cleaned every time after cooking, but the bottom half often gets ignored. As is the oven, the oven glass and the warming tray.
Being a big fan of natural products, I decided to tackle the cleaning with vinegar and nothing happened, then with baking soda and again nothing happened. Neither the vinegar nor the baking soda made any difference at all.
So, back to chemicals. It took hot water, good old trusted liquid Vim, a scrubber of steel wool and a good amount of elbow grease to scrub the oven glass clean. Where vinegar and baking soda failed, Vim managed just fine.
Next up, cleaning and deodorizing the microwave. The oven had a distinct smell of popcorn and I had read that heating up a cup of vinegar for one minute would get rid of the smell. So I did and after not one but two minutes, nothing happened. Not only did the microwave still smell of popcorn, but now it also smelled of vinegar.
As long as the vinegar was out, I decided to try something else. I’d read somewhere that if you spray wrinkled T-shirts and shirts with a solution of vinegar and water that the creases would disappear, thus cutting down on ironing.
I tried this and … nothing, this also didn’t work.
For a cleaning finale I decided to give the toilet bowl a go. I poured a generous amount of vinegar on the porcelain, waited half an hour, and hoped that the calcium stains had disappeared. They hadn’t. Next I tried with baking soda, waited another half an hour and went to have another look. Again I didn’t see any changes. So I called Clorox to the rescue and within seconds the bowl was perfectly clean.
This makes me wonder, if these experiments don’t work, is vinegar and baking soda really as powerful as the Internet claims them to be?