16 NOVEMBER 2015 CLEANING HYGIENE TODAY WOOD There is more than one point of view about the best way to get marks and scratches out of wood. One camp insists that when your cat savages a table leg then you should reach immediately for the mayonnaise. The other swears by the Brazil Nut. In fact the theory behind each of these ideas is pretty much the same. Brazil nuts contain “natural oils” that acts as a dye and blends scratches into the original wood. Mayo can boast plenty of its own oils that do the same thing. It might just take the title here though because apparently covering oil in mayonnaise makes it bloat, squeezing out any cracks in the surface. SILVER For those of you who still have (and polish) family silver then you might be used to seeing it tarnished. This is because your silver isn’t actually silver. Sterling Silver is an alloy of silver and another metal, most commonly copper. Most other “silver” products are a far cheaper metal that is covered in silver plate. It is the reaction between silver and the other metals (a process called oxidation) that creates the tarnished appearance. The old wives tale is that the best way to polish your silver and leave it sparkling like new is to dab a bit of toothpaste on and apply some elbow grease. A quick Google search for “cleaning silver, toothpaste,” will produce countless videos “proving” this. Many go into some detail about the science behind this, claiming that toothpaste is, at a chemical level, pretty much silver polish, only with a different price tag. Weirdly there are no videos of people using silver polish on their teeth though. Other websites however advice against this, toothpaste is more abrasive than polish and, because so much ”silver” is really just silver plate it will damage the thin layer of silver and expose the cheaper metal underneath to corrosion. But this may just be a conspiracy by the silver polish manufacturers who secretly run the world. So now we’ve gone through those household remedies that actually work (at least there is science behind them that suggests they should work), now its time to have a look at some that don’t work, and in one or two cases actually make things a whole lot worse. If toothpaste’s effectiveness is the topic of hot debate, then Ketchup is at boiling point. Some swear by it, claiming a dollop of the red sauce will leave silver so shiny it could blind you at a thousand paces. Those who want to back this belief up with evidence (or at least something that from certain angles vaguely resembles evidence) claim that this is because the tomatoes in ketchup contain an acid known as acetic that reacts with the oxidisation in the alloy. This is technically true. What they fail to point out though is that acetic acid is the scientific name for… vinegar. So, cleaning the silver with vinegar, or just lemon juice, would be just as effective. It would also not contain any of the other ingredients in ketchup that leave your silver a sickly pinkish-red. It is also less sticky, so easier to use. Not that it matters, silver polish does a better job either way. CHT tried it. COLA Pouring cola, or pretty much any other fizzy drink supposedly leaves your toilet clean enough to eat off. The idea is that cola contains acid (spotting the pattern yet?) which cleans the toilet bowl, and CO2 (the bubbles) which float away, meaning you don’t even have to do any scrubbing. So far so good. There are however two problems with this. First off, the levels of acid and CO2 in a bottle of coke are nowhere near as high as some people seem to assume. Orders of magnitude lower than the acids in actual toilet cleaner. Second, you might have noticed that actual toilet cleaner, when you use it, sticks to the side of the toilet bowl, settling and cleaning for a long time. Try pouring coke down the loo, it just flows away. Even if it could clean your toilet, it wouldn’t stick around long enough to do so. BANANAS Far from just being a staple of (magnificently unfunny) comedy movies where people go flying, banana skins can also polish leather. Apparently. Supposedly this is because bananas contain so much potassium which can help remove scratches in shoes, jackets and sofas. Whilst it is true that shoe polish does contain potassium, it also contains quite a few other ingredients as well. Without these team mates alongside it potassium just isn’t up to the job and cleaning leather with a banana just leaves it sticky and smelling really quite sickly. Sadly we know this for a fact. BICARBONATE OF SODA Finally we come on to the hero of so many old wives tales. Bicarbonate of soda, also known as baking soda. CHT might have exaggerated in the introduction about just how many problems it is claimed this can solve, but not by all that much. In truth baking soda is probably so popular for cleaning because it is so cheap. Though, next to vinegar the claims surrounding it might have the most basis in fact. Where vinegar is effective because it is so acidic and can react with alkaline, baking soda acts as a neutraliser, working with both acids and alkaline and maintaining a happy balance between both ends of the spectrum. The claims surrounding baking soda are so many that it would take another whole feature just to list them. However the tip of the iceberg is that this magic cure all will remove burns from the bottom of pans, stains from floors, bad odours from just about anywhere and put out grease fires in the kitchen. You know what, it probably will. FEATURE MYTHS “ Potatoes have magical powers and that all rust lives in mortal fear of the common spud
CHT November 2015
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