White Vinegar.
Is there anything this magic wonder can’t do? It makes me almost want to marry it. I use it to clean windows, the bathroom, the coffee maker, in the laundry, and on the floors. Did you know it has germ killing ability? And it’s cheap, like me. What’s not to like?
In the coffee maker: Fill the water reservoir with it and turn it on clean and after half the vinegar has gone through, unplug it. Let it set for the day and plug it back in that evening. What that does is holds the vinegar in the water lines allowing you to get more of the hard water crud out. Another little tip from Grams, my mom. Cool huh? We have extremely hard water here in our wheat field, but we’ve also have had the same coffee pot for over ten years now. So this really works.
In the laundry: I put in 1/4 to 1/2 cup in the fabric softener holder thingy. This takes moldy smells out of towels and all the residual soap and detergent out of your laundry during the rinse cycle. I can’t do laundry without it or my clothes line.
In the kitchen: Instead of using jet dry I use white vinegar in that reservoir thingy too. (I only put two teaspoon total of dish washing detergent, too.) My dishes come out clean and lovely.
In the bathroom: I spray and wipe down everything with it. For stubborn soap scum, add some baking soda to make a paste and scrub the enamel parts and the faucets and rinse.
On the floors: I mix half cup of vinegar to every gallon of water to clean the floors. This works really great for ‘dry mopping’ hardwood floors, that will buff to a shine.
Windows: Mix three tablespoons white vinegar, a quarter teaspoon dish soap and 2 cups of water in a spray bottle for windows that shine. (This will last me a year. That’s how much I love doing windows.)
These are old time tested ways to use this naturally green stuff. Isn’t it weird, what is old is new again. What goes around comes around. What do you use white vinegar for?
Simply,
Sis
Tags: all natural cleaners, cheap green cleaners, organic cleaners, Simple Money, uses for white vinegar, vinegar for floors, vinegar for hard water, vinegar for windows, vinegar in laundry, white vinegar
I use it to unclog drains.. fill the drain will some baking soda, and then quickly pour the vinegar in on top and close the drain. Let it set for about 15 minutes and then run hot water down the drain. I haven’t bought draino for a year.(sometimes if it is really bad I still have to pull some of the hair out but the vinegar still makes it alot easier.
Also through a cup or so in the bottom of your dishwasher. It will clean the moving parts on the dishwasher, and make your dishes sparkle.
HM–Sweet! I forgot about this one. That’s a good one. This almost always works, except when I had a rat-sized hair ball stuck in the pipes we had to get out with a snake. Ben doesn’t call me Chewbacca for nothing.
Beth–cool tip! I’ll try it at the stroke of midnight, when I run mine again.
Sam–I should run it through my humidifier and iron…it would work on an iron wouldn’t it?
Thanks. Sis
I use it when I have hard water stains on pots and calcium buildup on my humidifier. Just let the vinegar soak for a couple hours then rinse it out. Good as new.
Getting rid of pet odor after an “accident.”
I keep a spray bottle of vinegar by the washer and use it to pretreat the underarms of shirts to combat perspiration stains. The stains aren’t due to sweat but due to the aluminum in antiperspirant that leeches into fabric when it stops working. A spray and light rub with vinegar helps break down the aluminum deposits so your clothes wash clean. Yay vinegar!
Vinegar is great for many uses, but do not forget that it is acetic acid. So as harmless as it may be for cleaning the windows, if you leave it too long in your coffee maker for instance, it will accelerate the corrosion in the metal parts of it. So if you dont want rust in your coffee…
You can also spray vinegar on urine stains to take away the smell(like on a mattress or couch or whatever)…I have a severely handicapped 9 year old child that still has accidents sometimes…it works usally with one application, sometimes two.
No one has mentioned that it is also a miracle cure for 1st and 2nd degree burns. Soak your burnt area in vinegar after the accident and you will feel much better in a day or two. it helps with blistering as well.
One you don’t have is making your hair shinier & healthier, just rinse with white vinegar, here is how:
Shampoo then apply a vinegar rinse. You can rinse it all out, leave it in, or rinse with one quick rinse.
Here is a recipe:
1/2 tablespoon of vinegar to 1 cup of water, adding herbs and/or natural essential oils if you’d like.
Note: Leaving in the vinegar rinse helps prevent tangles and restores natural pH. While drying you smell vinegar, but once hair is dry, no smell. (more recipes and these tips can be found at chagrinvalleysoapandcraft.com/shampving.htm)
Thank you for this post, I wanted to start cleaning with vineger more and didn’t knwo any of the recipes.
I forgot say that vinegar also kills nits (lice) so if there is an outbreak in your childs school and they don’t have lice a quick rinse will help prevent.
Bleach is also a great anti-biological agent too. great Vinegar stuff.
Don’t forget the garden – vinegar can be used as a weedkiller. Mix it with a little liquid castile soap and water and heat it up a bit & spray it on weeds. Make sure not to get it on plants you want to keep.
Wow, who knew there were so many uses for vinegar? I didn’t. I’m going to try it on the hardwood floors. Thanks!
Wow, thanks for the tips. I’m going to try adding vinegar in my washe (for towels) and the dishwasher! I always hate buying those little extra things like Jet Dry, so I just skip that step. This way I won’t have to!
I use vinegar to make milk sour.
One of the alltime best uses for vinegar is on chips (fries) with a little salt. Mmmmm good
you can also mix with water so your ladie is a bit fresher down there
The three essential cleaning agents in my house are vinegar, bleach and ammonia. There isn’t much you can’t do with these three and it’s a lot cheaper than all the products on the market.
Thanks for reminding me how great vinegar is!
Cleaning with Vinegar makes your house smell like piss, yuck!
I live in the southwest. A lot of us dog owners have no grass but stones over the ground. After a while with little rain, a dog’s urine can stink up the back yard. I delute vinagar, pour it into a sprinkler can and pour it around the yard where the dog pees.
I use it on insect bites as it works wonders to draw out the toxin and stop the itch and with bee stings it draws out the stinger. It also helps with the pain of a sunburn, add about a cup full to a warm bath to draw the heat out of your skin. One more use for me is that it really helps when I have a few pesky acne bumps to dab some on, it stings a little but it speeds up the healing process for me. I could go on and on but I’ll stop now
You can also use it to kill nail fungus. Soak the nail in white vinegar for 20 minutes a day for a month and it will kill the fungus. I’ve also heard that it helps to apply vicks vapo-rub to the nail after the vinegar soak.
I keep a large jug of white vinegar in the kitchen – we have SUPER hard water (we live in the country and have a well), and if I didn’t use a couple splashes of vinegar in the rinse cycle of my dishwasher with every load, my dishes would be scaly and my dishwasher would soon be out of commission from all the hard water scale built up in it.
I’ve also used it for nail fungus removal, as mentioned by Doug above.
Vinegar is the best thing you can use to clean flat panel monitors and TVs. It gets them clean without damaging or permanently fogging the screen like most cleaners will.
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I use white vinegar to make my house smell funny. It works really well!
Thanks for the cleaning tips, I like to use vineger for getting rid of the smell of nicotine.
White vinegar is good, but apple cider vinegar (the brown stuff) is even better for most uses, including tummy issues. A teaspoon in a glass of cold water works better than Alka-Seltzer. .
DO NOT use it to “clean your lady down there” as another writer stated. this will lead to a severe imbalance in pH, and put a woman at risk for multiple infections such as urinary tract infections, bacterial vaginosis, or trichomonas. Nothing that makes a little vinegar worth it. soap and water work just fine.
takes off wallpaper better than any product i have found. helps sunburn pain.
it works great on the green lichen on patios, roofs, anywhere outside where you find the green mossy substance. Changes the PH and the stuff disappears. Have to do it when you have a couple of dry warm days. the smell goes away after a day or so
I am sure glad to see people still around that use cost effective ways of green living
I know vinegar does work great at cleaning but I cleaned my bathroom with it and it smelled like vinegar for days. I might be cheap but I don’t want my house smelling like that.
dilute a capful of applecider or white vinegar to half a gallon of water and use as a leave in conditioner. smell leaves almost right away and leaves your hair feeling sooooooo soft
Thanks for all the great comments on vinegar use. I use it for cleaning my stainless steel sauce pans by putting bon ami in the bottom of pan and pouring a little white vinegar in and cleaning with a paper towel inside and out!
I love to use vinegar to clean with, too, and have for years when living on a small budget and couldn’t afford all those expensive cleaners.
Have to mention…if anyone still receives a regular paper newspaper nowadays, be sure to use the pages with a vinegar spray to clean your windows. No ink will be left behind and your glass will be so sparkly you will think you are in that name brand commercial
Here’s my recipe for window/almost-all-purpose cleaner. Half fill a spray bottle with water. Add a quarter of the bottle’s volume with vinegar, an eighth of it’s volume with grain alcohol/vodka/isopropyl alcohol, 1 drop of soap for every 8 ounces, and 1 drop of grapefruit seed extract for every ounce of the bottle’s volume. You can use it on surfaces, windows, fruit and vegetables; just about everything. And all of the ingredients add to the water have germicidal/fungicidal properties, too.
1-For a shower head that has gotten clogged with mineral deposits, use a plastic sandwich bag over the head with a long twist tie ready, then pour in just enough vinegar (or vinegar and water mix) to almost fill the little bag – secure the twist tie and leave for a few hours or overnight. Give a good rinse / flushing with water before taking a shower.
2-Cleaning walls: use whatever you want to clean with, but always finish with a dilute vinegar rinse – walls stay cleaner longer!
3-I used vinegar in the car when my old cat had an “accident” on the way to the Vets – it smelled like chips for a short while, then no smell at all.
Your house must smell like a pickle. ;o)
Vinegar is the best thing for cleaning rabbit urine.
The only thing you can’t use it for is for consumption.
I constantly tell people that it’s used for cleaning: not eating!
If you cook fish or strong garlic or other lingering smells take and soak a cloth in white vinegar and ring out and swing cloth in air it will take the smell out of the air….our church would have dinners and the smell of vinegar may stink for a few minutes but will leave a clean smell after just a few minutes I don’t know where one person can say it smells like pee it clears almost immediately.
Thanks for all the tips, I forgot how useful vinegar can be.
Great tips! I never knew that vinegar could be used for so many things! I am going to go get some more right now! Thanks!
Has anyone mentioned it’s useful for getting rid of nasty LICE?!?! It works wonders. Before using the expensive shampoo treatment, spray or saturate hair with vinegar. Apparently, it disolves the sticky substance that lice use to adhere to the hair shaft. I was both horrified and amazed at the amount of lice that came crawling out of my daughter’s head as a reaction to the vinegar. After combing through, I went ahead and used the shampoo. Afterwards we kept a sports bottle filled with white vinegar in the shower and would occassionally give our heads a good rinse for good measure.
For those who claim it goes away when it dries, you either have become insensitive to it, or it’s under your threshold for detection. Vinegar is regularly diluted to only 5%. However, it’s so pungent that regular folks can pick it up in small doses (.48 part per million). Unfortunately, I have an extraordinary sense of smell, and while you might not notice at levels lower than .48 part per million, I will. When our dog has an accident, it’s slightly better than smelling dog urine, but takes over a week, under a fan, to remove the scent.
This professional microbiologist says: add a little to 10% chlorine bleach to make it a much more effect disinfectant.