Cleaning with Bleach

How useful are all of the cleaning products out there?

I usually just scrub the bathroom down with a bleach water solution but some people seem to swear by all sorts of expensive products. Is there anything to all of that other stuff or is bleach just as good a bathroom cleaner?

WP

Reply to
Will
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Will wrote: How useful are all of the cleaning products out there? Is there anything to all of that other stuff or is bleach just as good a bathroom cleaner?

WP

I need something to take mineral stains from the toilet bowl, nothing seems to get them all. I wish the scrubby bubbles, real or imagined, would do their job! What do you use? (Previous owners of this bowl (and the house) used the pumice stone until the bowl has ridges.) I want clean, REAL CLEAN!

Tell me what, how, and where? Lady Boot

Reply to
BootHill_Lady

It is an excellent bathroom cleaner. A small amount of soap (laundry detergent, Mr. Clean, Spic-and-Span, 409, etc) makes it even better. The bleach kills germs, deodorizes, and cleans. Make sure that when you use it keep in mind that any fabric it touches may take out the color, permanently. A small amount goes long way. Use ventilation.

Reply to
Phisherman

There are several reasons institutions tend not to use bleach. It lacks detergency, has an unpleasant odor, attacks finishes, loses strength rapidly, and requires that a surface be cleaned first. Many prefer quaternary ammonium chlorides, which they also find cheaper to use.

Reply to
Bart Byers

Use a acidic bowl cleaner, something that has muratic acid in it. You can mix your own from a 42% Muratic acid concentrate that you can buy at the hardware store. 42% muratic acid is very strong, and can eaisly burn your skin, so don't handle this if your not comfortable with a chemical this powerful.

Bowl cleaners with a much lower concentration of acid are commercially available and they should reslove your situation...

You could also try a strong base, like sodium hydroxide...

or,,

Try scrubbing it by hand with a good bleach cleaning powder. The one that is 50 cents a can at walgreens works well.

A commercial product called CLR works well if you use it full stregenth, and use enough of it and keep it in contact with the surface for long enough. Draw back is that it is expensive.

jamie

Reply to
Jamie Dolan

What they do can be different... Lets look at a couple of common ones...

Bleach, It is a pretty good disenfectant that will kill many household germs, viral, bacterial, spores, down side is that it can strip the wax off floors, destroy fabric and the structure of porus materials. It is cheap. It does not have much in the way of cleaning properties, it isnt really a detergent at all it is more of a good disenfectant. Be careful with what you mix with it. You can extract toxic gas by mixing it with a base like ammonia, and you can even liberate chlorine gas from it by mixing it with a strong acid.

Detergents, These include laundry detergents, simple green, dish soap, mr. clean, and a number of others. Many of these produces clean very well, but do not disenfect.

Quat cleaners -- Lysol, all except lysol concentrate are quat cleaners. They disenfect well. They work the best on surfaces that are already clean, i.e. clean the dirt off the floor first, and then mop with lysol, keep the floor / surface wet for 10 to 15 minutes to disenfect.

Ammonina cleaners, These include most glass cleaners, many multiple surface cleaners, It cleans glass well, can be good at cleans non porus surfaces, it works well to deodorize many surfaces. It can be very potent in it smell. It is kind of a old time secret to getting a clean smell in many situations... It is cleap. It does not disenfect. It can clean well in some situations, but I find one of its greatest values being how it deodorizes. It works well in laundry as well.

Pine extract based cleaners - Pine sol, and many many generic products. Many of these products have some detergent and some disenfectant properties. It is fairly mild, but can be good for a lot of multi pourpose cleaning and mild disenfecting.

There are other cleaners, but many are not eaisly available to consumers.

If you have more questions ask...

Jamie

Reply to
Jamie Dolan

Do you think that might be the most efficient approach at home? Hasn't research shown that for home use, washing hands with a regular soap protects you as well as a disinfectant soap? Maybe the same is true of washing a bathroom floor.

Reply to
Bart Byers

Yes, It is not a bad approach. We know with handwashing that it is far more important to wash your hands longer and more thourghly than the soap you use. That said, I still use a disinfectant soap at home, but more so because I like the way it works, in terms of lather and such. But a good case can also be made not to overuse disinfectants, due to there over use causing bacteria to become resistant.

At home, or anywhere else for that matter, cleaning well with a good detergent is a great start. I really like using a disinfectant atleast once in a while to kill things off that are building up, but I don't think this is necessarily required in all households. If you have school age children, or pets, I would really like to see you use some disinfectant cleaners atleast a couple times a month to make sure you are killing off germs, bacteria, viruses that are getting dragged in. It will also more aggressive control odors in some situations.

Bottom line, it really depends on the home situation as to weather it is really necessary or not. So in some cases, I would say that it is pretty important to use them atleast sometimes. In other cases, its not that important. I have 3 dogs and a cat here. So things get messy, we have accidents on the floor, etc. so I find using good disinfectants is a must to get things cleans up and get rid of odors. I use some more aggressive cleaning product in some situations at home because of the pets, but for the most part, most people do not need anything beyond detergents and occasionial use bleach or a quat cleaner, i.e. lysol,, esp important to use if you have pets / kids...

Hope that makes scents.

-jamie

Reply to
Jamie Dolan

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