My old tea strainer is stained dark brown but I want to give it to someone as I bought a new one.
I soaked it for days in vinegar and repeatedly brushed with a toothbrush but the bare metal ring and the metal mesh is still stained dark brown in places.
Is there a home handy chemical which dissolves tea stains?
I'd mix up a bleach solution and soak it overnight. Dishwasher usually does a good job too but if it is heavily stained, I'd do the bleach first.
Possible after heavy use it is down to bare natural metal. Is so, give the new one away.
I use the Clorex bleach on a pot I use for only tea. Mix it weak and let it sit for a few hours and then wash. Pot looks new after that.
Like you all, I have a lot of experience with bleach which doesn't "remove" anything. It just turns it a nicer color, but I don't want to change the color from brown to white, but to "dissolve" the thick tea stains.
I searched before posting and most people claim baking soda and vinegar (which is funny as one is an acid and the other a base) but they claim those two ingredients for everything. If they don't say "how" it works, it is just an old wives tale in most cases.
Some Internet articles say to mix "both" together. How to Clean Tea Stains from Stainless Steel
Maybe it's like ultrasonic cleaners though, where the foaming of the acid and base neutralizing each other shakes the flakes loose? I don't know.
They do mention bleach, where I guess how it works it is dissolves some of the metal around the hardened tannic acid based on what that article implied.
Popular science had an article on this.
They too recommend bleach but they don't say how it works. Maybe it oxidizes the stain away but my experience is it just turns it from brown to white.
Some articles recommended lemon juice but if they don't say how it works then they're just guessing. Same with denture cleaning tablets.
Bleach is an oxidizing agent and actually cleans. Sodium hypochlorite. So keep the negative attitude about it and don't bother trying. Would be less effort at this point just to buy a new one.
It has been sitting in bleach for days. It had been sitting in vinegar for days before that.
I tried the vinegar and baking soda and it fizzed like crazy but didn't do much more than that.
I need something stronger as you can't scrub that fine mesh without worrying about tearing it and the spring loaded halves are also not all that strong.
This says tannins are polyphenols and that tannic acid is water soluble.
Near the end they said they used boiling water and a sodium hydrogen carbonate solution to loosen the black-brown precipitates, but I don't even know what kitchen chemical sodium hydrogen carbonate is. Do you know?
Oh. They later said it was NaHCO3. Isn't that baking soda?
Oh. It is. The "bi" in the bicarbonate is an archaic naming convention.
When you heat up baking soda it turns into washing soda which is sodium carbonate.
Somehow that washing soda converted the tannic acid molecules into tannate anions which were more easily dissolved due to hydrogen bonds being formed they said.
They even ran an experiment with a tea bag which ballooned from the reaction of hot baking soda water but not cold baking soda water, so the heat is important.
Time to boil up some baking soda water.
Arlen, you seem quite obsessed with your $ 2. tea strainer .. ?
Time for meds ?
John T.
Time to toss it and buy a new one.
Efferdent or Polident? Oven cleaner? Sandblast it with baking soda? Put it in a rock tumbler with mild abrasive?
Then this newsgroup would never be needed to "fix" anything.
I already boiled it in two batches of sodium hydrogen carbonate water. It's a lot cleaner now. There are only a few spots left to work on.
If someone has a chemistry background on this ng maybe they can explain how it worked since just two applications dissolved most of the black brown tea stains better than anything else.
When you spend more energy and chemicals to fix rather than replace you have gone too far. Id it still makes tea, just use as is. Mine is in the dishwasher right now.
Are alla y'all functionally illiterate or what ? He said clearly in his original post that he DID buy a new one and wanted to clean this one up to give to someone .
Allen's intended recipient shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.
No, I read that but the same applies. If it is crap and cannot be fixed, trash it and give the person an new one. As it is, sort of like giving someone a gift of a chocolate bar you took a bite out of.
I give away or donate used stuff I don't need, but trash is trash.
When you fix, you learn. And what you learn enriches you for the rest of your life. It's why they invented education. Science labs, for example.
When you replace, you learn nothing. The result is you are a little bit poorer for the rest of your life. In every way possible. It's why they invented uneducated brain-dead factory workers.
Learn something, or learn nothing. It's your choice.
A long time ago I learned not to waste time on lost causes and I feel richer for it.
I don't blame you as it's far easier to learn nothing than to learn something, particularly when chemistry is involved which is hard for people like you who give up so easily.
Anyway, if you know of a photo site, I'll post a picture as it's almost brand spanking new looking. The hard part, always, was learning what the chemicals were that I needed to remove, and then what chemicals were needed to dissolve them.
There is no damage to the unit and my wife said it looks like it was given to the jewelry shop to clean because it's so shiny - but there are still a couple of black specs so I'm soaking it tonight in the hot sodium hydrogen carbonate solution.
I added a few teacups to the overnight soak to see if it works for those stains also, where what I found works best so far is a two-step approach.
I'm not sure which step needs to come first as I think I did the second step first, so I'll describe what I've learned using the steps I'd use in the future.
First, make a paste of sodium hydrogen carbonate on the object to be cleaned and then boil water and pour the hot water slowly (as it will bubble as the carbon dioxide is liberated in the process of turning baking soda into washing soda). This works at over 50 degrees C (which lasts about an hour).
Then, when that has softened the polyphenols by the creation of hydrogen bonds, physically agitate them at the micro level by again covering the object to be cleaned in a paste of sodium hydrogen carbonate and now immersing it into a container filled with 5% acetic acid (vinegar).
That will bubble so shield your eyes just in case, but also make sure you do this in a sink or outside as the liquid level will double with the tremendous foam that results. This process is a physical agitation process.
In my case, there was still some black-brown tannin polyphenol stains along the base of the tea strainer, so I scraped them away with a toothbrush and was surprised to see they had softened, almost like a thin gel, and hence were easily removed.
At this point there are only a few dots left inside the very tiny mesh squares of the screen, so it's soaking overnight.
My wife told me to stop as it looked almost new, but I want it to look perfect, and besides, she doesn't know it but her favorite teacup is also in the warm sodium hydrogen carbonate bath at this very moment. :->
Now that I know how it works, I'll look up more on the specific chemistry involved as it can be applied to a lot of other tannins, such as wine stains and maybe even grape juice stains (and maybe coffee stains?).
It looks so good right now my wife joked that it looks even better than the new one we bought, but only because it's all shiny now as if it was polished. But it still has a couple of black spots stuck in the fine mesh.
And it had a paste of black on the inside, by the handle, of the flat part of the crimping that holds on each of the two mesh half spheres that clamp together. Luckily that layer softened enough that I was able to scrape it off after a good soaking in the hot baking soda solution, where there is no way it would have come off except by sandpaper otherwise.
At this point, it's only the delicate mesh screen that has any black dots.
As for the chemistry, after my last post I ran an experiment with a tea bag and indeed the tea bag blew up like a balloon in the hot baking soda solution, but not in the cold baking soda solution, so there's definitely some nice fun chemistry going on there! :->
It's almost perfect now, but I still want to get it to be even more perfect.
Right now it's soaking again in the hot sodium hydrogen carbonate solution, and in the morning when I awake, I'll douse it with the acid/base combination that bubbles so frenetically that the liquid level doubles.
The first step softens the polyphenols apparently, and the second step shakes them off by the intense bubbling of carbon dioxide that emanates.
Leave the stains as is and call it " experienced " " with built-in flavour " :-)
Although some folks - who intend to gift a $ 2. tea strainer might gift the new one & keep the experienced one .. ? ... dunno just me I guess. John T.
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