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Household hints

Hair Conditioner as…Bathroom Cleaner???

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Faucet_in_a_bathroom_sinkHang onto your hats, folks: here’s a truly weird household hint. Diluted hair conditioner works, quite nicely and pretty efficiently, to clean the brightwork in your bathroom. Matter of fact, it’ll clean the sink and countertop, too. And probably the bathtub, if you’re in the mood to experiment.

The bizarre factoid came my way by pure serendipity. By accident, as a matter of fact.

As you may recall, I like to make my own glass cleaner, fabricating it with the same active ingredients that Windex uses. The product, which is clear as water, resides in a Home Depot industrial-strength squirt bottle in a bathroom cabinet. And not so long ago, I learned to pre-condition the dog’s fur before washing her by spraying her with diluted hair conditioner and working it into her fox-like pelt. Yesh. Supposedly if you do this, it somehow creates magnificent results.

Well, it doesn’t. It serves mostly to enhance the degree of canine annoyance at the dog-bathing experience. HOWEVER, this much-diluted hair conditioner (about 1 part conditioner to five or six or more parts water) does have a salutary effect on the human’s fur, when the weather in the low desert is so dry that static electricity makes it stand up all over one’s head like you stuck your finger in a light socket. A very light misting of the stuff instantly eliminates the hair-crackle, and, as a bonus, enhances one’s natural curl. Assuming one has that to start with.

This clear stuff also resides in a Home Depot industrial-strength squirt bottle in the bathroom cabinet.

So, as you may now imagine, the other day when it was past time to clean the bathroom, I reached under the cabinet and hauled out the spray bottle of DIY Windex. Squirted it all over the faucet and sink and tile countertop and…thought well, hell!

I’d managed to douse everything with hair conditioner. This, the train of thought continued, is going to be one big, gloppy mess to clean up!!!!!

Hauled out the paper towels, figuring to soak up the worst of it and then scrub, scrub, and scrub again with Simple Green to get the rest of it off.

But…nooooo!

It wiped off the hard surfaces like a freaking dream! It left the faucet clean, bright, and shiny. Did the same to the tile.

I expected it just looked that way, so attempted to rinse what I imagined was the rest off with water.

Nothing. No glop, no suds, no slime.

WTF?

Cautiously, I squirted a bit of it on the kitchen faucet.

Polished the thing right up.

Okay. The acid test: I apply my powdered mineral makeup in the back bathroom, where the light is adequate. The stuff settles on every available surface, merrily staining the sink and countertop a lovely “medium-beige” puce and requiring some serious cleaning to keep the place more or less presentable. So it was off to the back bathroom with the squirt bottle full of diluted hair conditioner.  If this doesn’t make the mess from Hell, I figured, nothing will!

Apparently nothing will. It cleaned the back bathroom sink and faucet right up, just as bright and shiny as if I’d washed it down with Lysol or Simple Green. And it smelled a lot better.

I have no idea what on earth the chemistry behind this phenomenon might be. We do know that some women have taken to washing their tresses with hair conditioner, having developed, for reasons incomprehensible to personkind, an abiding suspicion of shampoo. And we also know that a very light skiff of olive oil or other vegetable oil will polish chrome faucets quite prettily. But…but…hair conditioner as bathroom cleaner?

Dunno. All I know is it worked.

Image: Tomwsulcer. Faucet in a Bathroom Sink. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

Dishwasher Conundrum, Updated

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Soooo… I decided I wasn’t nuts, after all, about the TSP that I ordered up by way of making the dishwasher work in the absence of effective dishwash detergent. After a few washes, the stuff was leaving a white, powdery residue on all the dishes. It could be wiped off with a towel, but…eeeewwww! Who wants to ingest whatever that is?

Tried to get my hands on some commercial-grade Cascade through Restockit.com but that little deal fell through with a frustrating runaround.

dishwashermagicThen remembered that the last time the dishwasher was stumbling, a repairman advised using a product called Dishwasher Magic. So, tiring of washing all the dishes by hand and using the washer as a giant dish drying rack, I picked some up at the local Ace Hardware and, following the instructions, ran it through an empty wash cycle.

Wow!

This stuff is fantastic! Last night’s glasses came out perfectly clean and clear — no spots, no sticky white film — with just the usual weak-sister detergent and a cup or so of vinegar. The problem must have been that the washer was just dirty.

Dishwasher Magic comes in a container with a wax lid. You remove the plastic cover, then turn the bottle upside down and place it in the utensil rack. Before hitting the “On” button, turn the washer to its hottest cycle, and also run hot water through tap into the kitchen sink until the tap does run hot.

The wax plug then melts and the toxic contents are released into the washer, where they evidently dissolve everything that even faintly resembles dirt or grease. If your washer has a stainless steel tub, as mine does, the thing glows in the dark by the time you’re done.

The repairman who recommended the product suggested getting a couple of bottles, since a really dirty washer may require more than one effort.

Pay attention to what the store is selling. The guys at the nearby TruValue tried to sell me a product for cleaning and deodorizing stinky front-loading clothes washers — they didn’t understand that there’s a difference. Then I found the product locally at the Ace and got the last bottle on the shelf. Amazon carries it in gay abandon, though.

Buy Local First.
🙂

More on the Dishwasher Detergent Issue

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In response to Funny’s recent rant about phosphate-free detergents, reader Linda responded with this observation:

 So, I did some more searching online and I found this site that went over several options. http://www.jillcataldo.com/phosphatedetergents With a little more searching, I found that I could buy the commercial (phosphate-full) Cascade at a chain called Gordon Food Service that had some outlets in my area. Since the BF had an appointment not far from one today, I asked him to pick up a box. We had a pretty full dishwasher, so he gave it a test run today while I was at work. Success!! 🙂

So I went over to Jill’s blog and found a truly awesome discussion, complete with details of experiments with various products and photos. Interestingly, she reports that recent science indicates that phosphates are not the environmental menace we’ve been made to believe they are:

A Minnesota study determined that the amount of phosphates generated from home use that were actually reaching bodies of fresh water was about 1.9%. And, in 2011, the University of Washington released a study that determined that phosphorous runoff from detergents, even when discharged directly into the Spokane River, never worked as an algae fertilizer: “Effluents making their way into the river contained phosphorus in complex molecular forms which are not bioavailable. Algae lack the enzymes necessary to break down this phosphorus, meaning it is essentially harmless.”*

*But see comments below and update for the full story on this statement.

Basically what’s happening here is we’re all being made to do without something that works for questionable reasons.

Not quite all of us: it’s OK to inconvenience the hoi polloi and put families’ health at risk by making them eat off dirty dishes, but it’s not OK to inconvenience corporate America: real detergent is still freely available to those who use it in vast quantities: restaurants, hotels, and institutions.

Jill also includes a long list of links to articles proving her point on this matter.

For  me, the TSP used in small quantities (not more than 1/4 teaspoon) is working, although it certainly is a nuisance to have to scrub its stain off the inside of the dishwasher door. And most of a lifetime supply of Finish Powerless Powerball detergent tabs resides on my storage shelves. So I’ll probably finish off the Finish and then buy some of the Professional Line Cascade, since Jill’s tests seem to indicate it works very well.

…hey! Waitaiminit!…

Just checked and discovered the Costco box of Finish hasn’t been opened yet!

w00t! Back it goes!

I’m taking that back to the store TODAY and ordering up some actual detergent for restaurants. The city has several restaurant supply houses, one of which is on my way to a Costco — if they carry commercial dishwasher detergent, I’ll stop there to pick it up. Otherwise: order it online!

Update: Given that Jill takes the quote from the University of Washington study out of context, thereby making it seem to draw a different conclusion than what the report actually presents, let’s take a look at a few lines from the Avatar of Scientific Accuracy, the beloved Wikipedia:

It is unclear what causes HABs [harmful algae blooms]; their occurrence in some locations appears to be entirely natural,[16] while in others they appear to be a result of human activities.[17] Furthermore, there are many different species of algae that can form HABs, each with different environmental requirements for optimal growth. The frequency and severity of HABs in some parts of the world have been linked to increased nutrient loading from human activities. In other areas, HABs are a predictable seasonal occurrence resulting from coastal upwelling, a natural result of the movement of certain ocean currents.[18] The growth of marine phytoplankton (both non-toxic and toxic) is generally limited by the availability of nitrates and phosphates, which can be abundant in coastal upwelling zones as well as in agricultural run-off. The type of nitrates and phosphates available in the system are also a factor, since phytoplankton can grow at different rates depending on the relative abundance of these substances (e.g. ammonia, urea, nitrate ion). A variety of other nutrient sources can also play an important role in affecting algal bloom formation, including iron, silica or carbon. Coastal water pollution produced by humans and systematic increase in sea water temperature have also been suggested as possible contributing factors in HABs.[19] Other factors such as iron-rich dust influx from large desert areas such as the Sahara are thought to play a role in causing HABs.[20] Some algal blooms on the Pacific coast have also been linked to natural occurrences of large-scale climatic oscillations such as El Niño events. While HABs in the Gulf of Mexico have been occurring since the time of early explorers such as Cabeza de Vaca,[21] it is unclear what initiates these blooms and how large a role anthropogenic and natural factors play in their development. It is also unclear whether the apparent increase in frequency and severity of HABs in various parts of the world is in fact a real increase or is due to increased observation effort and advances in species identification technology.

Sources for this paragraph are as follows:

Sellner, K.G.; Doucette G.J., and Kirkpatrick G.J. (2003). “Harmful Algal blooms: causes, impacts and detection”. Journal of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology 30 (7): 383–406. doi:10.1007/s10295-003-0074-9. PMID 12898390

Van Dolah, F.M. (2000). “Marine Algal Toxins: Origins, Health Effects, and Their Increased Occurrence”. Environmental Health Perspectives (Brogan &#38) 108 (suppl.1): 133–141. doi:10.2307/3454638. JSTOR 3454638. PMC 1637787. PMID 10698729.

Clearly, this is a very complex issue. Algal blooms, some of them toxic and some of them leading to eutrophication, have been happening since the memory of Person runneth  not to the contrary…and certainly since long before any upright ape figured out how to make soap. That doesn’t mean your dishwasher isn’t suffocating the nearest lake. But it does cast some doubt.

TSP: Dishwasher Rises from the Dead!

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P1020531Unless you’ve been living on another planet or out in the middle of the Mohave Desert with George, by now you no doubt have felt the effects of American dishwasher detergent manufacturers’ self-banning of trisodium phosphate (TSP). This chemical, which happens to be the ingredient that used to make dishwasher detergent and a number of other cleaning products work, has been banned in 17 states of the United States of America, because when it runs off into ponds and lakes, it promotes eutrophication by richly fertilizing algae. Rather than pony up the money to market useless detergents to citizens of those states only, manufacturers chose the cost-effective road: they took TSP out of all dishwasher detergent.

Update: For a more nuanced view of this issue, see my August 30 post spinning off a link provided by a FaM reader.

The result, as many of us have noticed, has been that even the fanciest, priciest dishwasher just doesn’t get your dishes clean. Especially glasses, which come out with a stubborn, ugly, milky film all over them.

And as you know if you’re a regular reader of Funny about Money, I buy lifetime supplies of just about everything at Costco — dishwasher detergent included. Because I live with a small dog, who can’t be accused of dirtying up a lot of dishes, the dishwasher here at the Funny Farm certainly doesn’t run every day. I wait till the machine is full to turn it on…and that’s about every second or third day. So when detergent that worked went off the market a few years ago, I missed the momentous event: it wasn’t until a few months ago that I bought any of the new, wimpy dishwasher stuff.

And because I dose each load with a generous splash of vinegar, the baleful effects of the new stuff have been attenuated. Sort of.

Of late, though, the glasses have been emerging from the washer covered with a light skiff of grease or the telltale milky coating. In short, the dishwasher hasn’t been getting the damn dishes CLEAN! If I weren’t by nature cranky as a cat, this would topple the Fat Lady over the brink.

Over the many months since the righteous regulatory event came to pass, I’ve been reading bloggers’ reports to the effect that adding a little TSP, which most of us can buy at our nearest hardware store, solves the annoying problem. So yesterday I bought a box of it at the local Ace.

And lemme tell you: it doesn’t just work. It works with a vengeance!

Now understand: I’d already scoured the milky stuff off the glasses with Barkeeper’s Helper (TSP will not, by itself, remove this coating, at least not in one or two washings), and I’d been washing the damn things by hand for weeks. This caused a great deal of resentment, because I would not own a pricey Bosch dishwasher if washing dishes by hand was what I had in mind as a desirable pastime. So in general what would happen if a glass got dropped into the washer was that it would come out ever so slightly greasy. Many washings like that would have left it with a difficult-to-scour-off film, but the glasses weren’t at that stage. Just dirty. Accursedly dirty.

Following a kind of Netizens’ consensus, I put ¼ teaspoon of the TSP into the detergent cup with one Finish Powerball detergent tablet thingie. I splashed about ¼ to ½ cup of vinegar into the washer tub. Turned the contraption on. And went to bed. Dunno how well you can see this…

P1020535

…but what emerged from the dishwasher this morning had NO sticky white hard-water deposit, NO spots, and NO delicate layer of grease! It was absolutely, positively, totally CLEAN.

Everything else in that load came out incredibly clean, too: the stainless-steel saucepan glowed in the dark; the stoneware dishes squeaked when touched; the silver plate forks and spoons came out clean and shiny.

Interesting.

I suspect a quarter of a teaspoon is more than needed, unless your water is even more extravagantly hard than it is here in the low desert (that would be a stretch). You might get away with an eighth of a teaspoon. And if, like me, you don’t run the washer every single day, any such minuscule amount would add a minimal load of phosphates to the sewer runoff. If you do have a family, it would be easy enough to hold the glassware aside, run the pots, pans, silverware, and plates through with the wimpo-detergent each day, and then fill the washer with glassware once every two or three days to be washed with a tiny amount of TSP.

{sigh} Lord, spare us!

Update: This post was included in the August 26 edition of the Carnival of Personal Finance, hosted by According to Athena,
and in the September 3 edition of the Lifestyle Carnival, hosted by Money Soldiers

Use It Up, Make It Do, Wear It Out: The Joy of Fixing Stuff

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UseItUpWearItOutMakeItDoSome years ago, I bought a pretty little copper watering pot. It came from Smith and Hawken, though I may have found it at Target, which used to carry quite a lot of Smith and Hawken products, especially before the outdoor department was shut down. I don’t even think Smith and Hawken makes this design anymore — it doesn’t come up in a cursory search.

Well, it was very cute, but none too practical — its long, graceful spout dispenses water too slowly for my taste. I’m the douse-and-run type of indoor gardener, I’m afraid. So it got set down between a couple of potted plants and pretty much forgotten, unless a visitor remarked on how interesting it was. Last time I used it, it got splashed with water and put away wet, giving it a smallpox-like spattering of dark, round stains. Over the years, it acquired a dark brown layer of tarnish, which did nothing to cover the pox.

It looked terrible. I pushed it back behind the pots (too lazy to find a real place to put it away) and forgot about it.

Well, you know, indoor plants suffer as much from the drought as the landscape and the forests do. The dry air sucks moisture out of potting soil, and in the summer when the AC is set at 80 to 83 degrees, it’s really too hot for tropical plants best suited to live on the rainy side of Hawai’i. They cling to life, but barely.

The other day I decided to clean up the dead foliage and then thoroughly water and fertilize the poor little things. And what should I find in behind the sanseveria and prayer plants but that old copper pot, much the worse for neglect.

Would a quick scrub with Barkeeper’s Helper clean off those dark, ugly water spots?

Nothing ventured…

…And nothing gained: the answer was nope! It did revive the copper glow a little, though. Not much, but some.

The rubber gauntlet was now down: here was a challenge I had to rise to.

Out came all the metal-cleaning products and all the old-wives’ wisdom to which I am privy — which by now, my children, is quite a bit. So…

How to Clean and Polish Copper

Just about any good metal cleaner will help to scour tarnish off copper. The ones actually marketed as copper cleaner are by far the best — brass cleaner and silver cleaner will work, but not as effectively. Dedicated copper cleaner, interestingly, is not all that easy to find these days. If you want it, you may have to order it online.

CopperCreamPersonally, I prefer the creamy type, possibly just because that’s what I’ve always used. But I didn’t have any around, so used some silver cream, also by Wright, which seems to have a good toehold on the grocery-store shelves.

Silver cream didn’t work much better than the Barkeeper’s Helper. So it was time for recourse to the home products.

Just about any combination of salt plus sour stuff will eat the tarnish right off uncoated copper. Your choices look this:

• vinegar and table salt
• cut lemon and table salt
• ketchup (contains vinegar and salt, along with all the sugar, the tomato, and the artificial ingredients)
• lemon juice and cream of tartar

Neither ketchup nor lemon & cream of tartar work much better than Barkeeper’s Helper, which is good enough for government work. If you don’t want a really shiny effect, one of these three choices may do the job for you.

Rubbing a half a lemon over the metal and then sprinkling liberally with salt does the job a little better, IMHO. It’s a fair amount of work — you have to reapply the lemon juice and salt several times, and scrub well with a dampened sponge.

The easiest and hands-down most effective home copper cleaner is a combination of white vinegar and table salt. You can mix these together (at least 3 Tbsp salt to two cups of vinegar) or simply pour vinegar all over the object, then salt it generously, and then scrub with a sponge or rag.

Whether you use lemon juice or vinegar, WEAR RUBBER GLOVES FOR THIS CHORE! Vinegar and salt combine to form hydrogen chloride, a strong acid — I once actually etched a concrete floor with the stuff.

As soon as your copper piece is clean, wash it well in soap and water or with baking soda (neutralizes acid), and wash down your sink, lest any leftover acid etch the porcelain. Then dry the piece well with a clean, dry towel.

Copper tarnishes fairly quickly in the presence of oxygen and carbon dioxide — that would be the stuff we call “air.” Some people like that effect, regarding it as a pleasing patina. Others like their copper shiny.

You can delay the corrosion and also give your copper piece a deeper glow by rubbing a very light layer of vegetable oil over it. Go easy on this — you don’t want it to be greasy, just polished. I used olive oil, which also makes the brightwork in the kitchen and bathroom look pretty nice.

Don’t you love to bring new life to old things like this? I think it’s much more satisfying to fix stuff than to go out and buy new stuff.

Here’s how the little pot turned out…

P1020468

Going over to LED Lighting

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IncandescentLightbulbMy neighbor Will, an engineering type who loves numbers, decided to switch out all the lights in his house to LEDs. In his enthusiasm, he created this incredible spreadsheet analyzing the Great Changeout and comparing wattage and other aspects. The thing is fairly elaborate, so I’m going to upload it as an Excel file:

Will’s House Lighting

The file has two spreadsheets, so check out the tabs at the bottom when you open it.

Will says he figures his utility-bill savings are about $25 to $30 a month. I asked him how he came to that conclusion — by comparing power bills, or by calculating energy use based on the lights’ wattage — and whatever got into him to engage this potentially pricey project. Here’s what he says:

§ § § §

Savings are based on watts consumed compared from beginning 2008 until now. The average is $30 a month, with the change of bulbs and Levelor black-out blinds on the sunny side of the house.

Actually I started incandescent, then went to CFL (Compact Florescent Lights), and am still moving to L.E.D. bulbs as I find ones cheap enough and that fit my purpose both in color and fixture.

LED_bulbs
CFL’s now come in blue/green and warm white. They take longer to charge up, when cold, and to come up to full brightness, which is annoying in  the winter time.

Flickering: Incandescent bulbs flash on and off at a rate of 60 times a second. CFLs flicker like the charged gas they have inside. But L.E.D. bulbs are constant narrow-band light…no flicker….no UV, no attracting bugs,

The cost per bulb is listed on the sources tab of my sheet, as well as where to get them.  I try to keep to around $19 to $25 a bulb.

I have been changing them out a chunk at a time. I plan to do the rest of the PAR 30 lamps this year.

In the candela type bulb, I have only been able to find a good CFL equivalent. So far none of the L.E.D. versions have  met my specifications.

The original 60-watt incandescent were cooking my fan lights. So they got changed to CFLs right away, to prevent a fire hazard.

I did the spread sheet because about ten people were asking for the information and I found myself rewriting it over and over. I figured I’d do this spreadsheet to save me the time.  Since I was already doing the research for myself I figured I’d share and save others the hassle of figuring out all the engineering crap you have to wade through in order to understand these.

It seems many L.E.D. bulb manufacturers want you to pay for all their engineering, so the bulb is like a hundred bucks. And they wonder why no one wants to buy it.

It sort of like those stereo speaker ads from the 70s and 80s.  “Big sale! Pair of 200 Watt speakers for $49.99!” But the problem was it was a big lie.  They were actually thinking 100 watts per speaker, that being maximum peak power rating, so after you calculated the RMS value, they were actually 50-watts speaker. With today’s L.E.D. bulbs you CAN NEVER GO BY THE INCANDESCENT EQUIVALENT ON THE PACKAGE…they are either lying or don’t know their product. 🙂

If I replace the rest of the bulbs to L.E.D, I will have gone from over 3000 watts usage to below 700 watts, and that’s just in bulbs. I may use LightKiwi BR30 bulbs for outside motion safety lights. I’m currently using 75-watt incandescents, but these LightKiwi bulbs are only 11 Watts each.  $24 from manufacturer’s web page or when on sale at Newegg .

Now if I can just get the hamsters to power the a/c in the summer I’ve got it made. 😉

§ § § §

You can see what other mischief Will has been up to by going to his central website and exploring from there.

Images:

Incandescent bulb: Gluehlampe. KMJ, alpha masking by Edokter. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
LEDs: Commercially available LED lamps (“light bulbs”) with Edison (screw-type) base. Geoffrey.landis at en.wikipedia. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.