This Baijiu Lookalike Will Transform Your Bathroom
It's
clear, it's pungent and it will knock your socks off. The powerhouse,
limescale-fighting, magical potion of your dreams has been hiding out in
plain sight all this time.
It's vinegar. 醋. Cù. Yep, boring, cheap, regular, old vinegar.
Tah-dahhhh!
Distilled
white vinegar is the cheapest, most effective, and most
ecologically-friendly way to deal with the limescale that plagues
bathrooms all over Beijing. So you can stop buying products from the
supermarket that promise to descale and clean your bathroom, but
actually, just clean out your WeChat wallet instead. Here's the lowdown:
Tap
water in Beijing (and all over China) is very high in minerals.
Actually, it's far from a China-exclusive problem. Minerally water like
this is known as 'hard water' and occurs all over the world. As water
from the tap evaporates from surfaces, it leaves behind mineral
deposits. Over time, they build up on your faucets, shower glass,
drains, and shower heads, creating a layer of crust that seems
impossible to remove, and blocks water flow in the process.
Vinegar contains diluted acetic acid,
which reacts with the calcium carbonate in this mineral buildup
(limescale) to produce calcium acetate, which is soluble in water and
easily washes away. This makes it your best friend when it comes to
battling scale in the bathroom.
Distilled white vinegar (白醋, bái cù) is
best, but honestly, just about any kind of vinegar will do, even rice
wine vinegar. As long as it contains acetic acid, it'll work.
Ain't nobody getting clean from that
Soak your shower head – Unscrew
the shower head, and soak it in enough vinegar to cover it fully, for a
couple of hours. If you can't unscrew the head, lift it off the hook so
it's hanging down, pour vinegar into a strong plastic bag (or Ziploc),
and tie it over the shower head. Take it out, give it a gentle scrub or
just rub over the nozzles with your thumb, and you're good to go. Repeat
this every couple of weeks or whenever you notice the shower nozzles
becoming blocked.
Clean your shower partition – Mix
up a solution of equal parts filtered water and vinegar (plus a couple
of drops of essential oil for fragrance, if you like) in a spray bottle.
Shake to mix, then spray a fine layer over the glass. Have the fan
running and perhaps cover your mouth while you do this. Vinegar isn't
toxic, but breathing in a lungful does sting a bit. Leave the vinegar to
soak for a moment (but don't leave it to dry), then wipe down with a
sponge. Repeat if necessary, until all limescale is gone.
Rinse
the vinegar off, then dry down the glass and enjoy how pristine it
is... until your next shower. For really stubborn/long-term scale (like,
nobody's ever even tried to do this before), you may need to apply
quite a lot of vinegar and scrub with a gentle abrasive to get it done.
Repeat this spray-and-wipe every week to keep on top of the situation.
No one likes a green knob
Clean your chrome – Use the same spray solution on your chrome taps and handles. Simply spray on, wait a moment, then wipe off with a sponge. Shiny!
Soften your fabrics – Vinegar
makes a fantastic natural fabric softener. Dump about a cup in the
fabric softener tray of your front loader, or pour in directly with your
top-loader washing (even at the same time as the detergent, it seems to
work fine). Once dry, your clothes will not smell vinegary (it dries
odorless), and your duds will come out much softer than usual.
Disinfect your humidifier – Unplug
and disassemble your humidifier. Rinse the filter with water (nothing
else, as this can damage the filter) and set to dry. Wash out the tank
and soak in vinegar. Reassemble the unit, but add a cup of vinegar to
the water tank. Run the humidifier for an hour, rinse out the tank and
fill with water as usual. You should do this once a week during times of
heavy use.
These are just a couple of the best
Beijing-hard-water specific uses for vinegar, but there are literally
hundreds of applications such as:
Descaling your kettle.
Cleaning your coffee machine.
Steaming the inside of your microwave.
Removing streaks and smudges from your mirrors and windows.
Improving your GPA (lol jk).
Just
search 'vinegar cleaning' online for more but, and this is a big but,
beware of recipes that call for a mixture of vinegar and baking soda.
Individually, these are both very effective cleaning agents, but when
mixed together they do bugger all, except fizz. But fizzing does not =
cleaning. This fizzing is just the chemical reaction when baking soda
(sodium bicarbonate) and vinegar (acetic acid) break down into sodium
acetate, water, and carbon dioxide. Go here for more details on that: thoughtco.com/equation-for-the-reaction-of-baking-soda-and-vinegar-604043.
Oh, and never mix vinegar with chlorine bleach or you'll create deadly chlorine gas and kill us all.
Happy cleaning!
READ: Why the Bathroom in Your Chinese Apartment Smells Awful (And How to Fix It)
Images: The Spruce, singaporeplumbingworks.com, dribbble.com, memeguy.com, bustle.com
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