Vinegar: A Green All Purpose Cleaner?

Vinegar spray is a cheap and eco-friendly alternative to store-bought cleaning sprays with many uses and some surprising potency as an all-purpose cleaner. I am not a home solutions guru or anything like that, to be frank, but I am a person looking for ways to be green and ways to save money. Vinegar spray turns out to be a meeting of the two.

Vinegar in the bathtub

Vinegar can clean your tub…at least it cleaned mine.

A few weeks ago I bought some vinegar, put it in a spray bottle, and went to work. Without knowing exactly how potent the solution would be as a cleaner, I decided to try the hardest to clean place first – the bathtub.

Usually I use bleach in the bathtub, but the vinegar spray worked better to loosen soap scum and get the tub clean.

The up-side of vinegar

There are more uses for vinegar too. It’s a fairly gentle cleaning agent, safe for counter-tops, inside and outside the fridge, and it even works on glass. You can get a bottle of vinegar for about as much as a bottle of bleach. Diluted with water in a spray bottle, you’ve got an all-purpose cleaning spray for the kitchen and the bathroom.

Safer than bleach and, arguably, more widely useful, vinegar is also a natural product.

The down-side of vinegar

The biggest downside of using a vinegar spray as a cleaner, for me, is the smell. The smell of vinegar is not exactly the smell of “clean”. When you use bleach, you can smell the clean. When you use vinegar you just smell vinegar.

That takes some getting used to. All in all, using vinegar as a cleaning spray makes it easy to be green.