3 Great Natural Ingredients For Cleaning Your Home
Natural cleaning products are really taking off at the moment and more people than ever are making their own instead of buying them. The problem with most of the cleaning chemicals that you buy is that they contain a lot of harsh chemicals, some of which can be bad for your health. They affect the air quality in your home because those chemicals hang around, which is not good news for you and your family. Some of those chemicals have the potential to upset allergies if you have them as well. There is also the environmental factor to consider because a lot of the ingredients in cleaning products are harmful to the environment. When you throw away the old bottles, they end up in landfill and the chemicals leak out. If you want to protect your own health and be more environmentally friendly at the same time, you should consider using natural alternatives to the cleaning chemicals that you would normally buy. People worry that they won’t be able to clean their home properly with these alternatives but that isn’t true at all. As long as you use the right ingredients, they will do the same job.
A lot of people are unaware of all the toxic chemicals found in chemical cleaning products, specially oven cleaners. Using homemade natural cleaners like baking soda and vinegar not only is gentler to the environment but more importantly less riskier to your health and not to mention, more cost-effective.
These are the best natural ingredients for cleaning your home.
Vinegar
Vinegar is one of the most popular natural home cleaning ingredients out there and you can use it for so many things. You can buy specific cleaning vinegar, but standard white vinegar will do the same job. Undiluted vinegar can be used for cleaning your toilet if you simply pour some around the bowl and give it a good scrub. It’s also great for making your own homemade cleaning sprays. Some white vinegar, diluted with a bit of water, will work wonders for cleaning windows or mopping floors. You can soak some citrus peels in there or use essential oils to give it a nice scent and mask the vinegar smell. You don’t need to worry about the smell too much anyway because it will go quite quickly.
Vinegar is also great if you live in a hard water area and you have a lot of problems with limescale. If you fill your kettle with vinegar and leave it to soak for a few hours, or even overnight, it will cut through all of that limescale and you can rinse it all out. You can use it to clean off your taps and shower-heads as well.
If you have a dishwasher, you should be cleaning it regularly and you can buy dishwasher cleaner. But you don’t need to spend all of that money because some vinegar diluted in water will do the same job. When it comes to natural cleaning products, vinegar can do just about anything.
Lemons
Lemons are another great cleaning product that you can use all over the home. It can be used for a lot of the same things that you would use vinegar for, especially scaling the kettle, but it has other uses as well. It’s great for cleaning wood, so if you have a chopping board that has a lot of stains, you should get half a lemon with a little salt and give it a scrub.
Lemons are great at soaking up bad odors as well, so you should try them in your fridge. All you need to do is chop one in half and leave it flesh side up in the fridge and it will keep it fresh. This quality also makes citrus ideal for laundry because it will keep things smelling fresher for longer. You can get some great citric extracts for laundry which are a much better option than most normal laundry detergents and fabric softeners because they can be very harsh on the skin. People with allergies are particularly susceptible to these harsh laundry products, so you should consider switching to something citrus based instead.
Baking Soda
Baking soda is the best ingredient for cleaning anything that is white. One of the most popular uses for baking soda is cleaning the grout between your bathroom tiles. Over time, grime and mold will build up and you may need to replace the grout, but before you do that, you should get some baking soda. Just sprinkle some on and spray it with a bit of water, and then leave it for ten minutes. If you give it a scrub, it should look good as new.
It can also be used for unclogging your sink if it gets blocked. Instead of using drain cleaners that can often contain very harsh chemicals, you should put a few spoonfuls of baking soda down the plughole and let it sit for a while. Then boil up some vinegar and pour it down and it should cut through all of the grease and grime.
It’s good for laundry as well, especially if you have stains. Instead of buying stain remover, you can make your own with some baking soda mixed with a little water. The paste acts as a general stain remover for white clothes. You can also freshen up your laundry and stop your whites from going dull if you put a cup of baking soda in the washing machine.
When your oven gets dirty, you can use baking soda to clean it. The oven cleaners that you can buy usually contain some very harsh chemicals that you don’t want to breathe in. The best way to do it is to sprinkle baking soda over the oven and then spray a little vinegar on and let it sit for a while. That should lift off the grease and you will be able to scrub it off easily. If there are some particularly stubborn stains in the oven, you can make a paste with water and baking soda and use it to scrub them off.
You can even use baking soda as a natural deodorant if you take a pinch and rub it on your underarms. It’s a lot better for the environment than using spray deodorants and it stops irritation as well.
If you use these natural alternatives in your home, you can keep it clean without having to worry about the chemicals in cleaning products.
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