Baking Soda and Vinegar Are Good for Cleaning, Just Not Together

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From viral hacks to your grandmother, someone or something has, at some point, told you to clean with baking soda and vinegar. Even I have told you to clean with baking soda and vinegar. Yesterday, sadly, I learned that this approach isn't all it's cracked up to be. Let's discuss.

Why you shouldn't mix baking soda and vinegar to clean

The good news is that this mixture isn't toxic or dangerous in any way. You're not poisoning yourself over time if you mix vinegar and baking soda to get a bubbly paste to scrub onto your walls, countertops, or tile. The bad news is that it just doesn't do much.

See, yesterday, I wrote about the best methods for cleaning water stains off white walls. As I expected, I got better results when I cleaned the water stain with a mixture of lemon juice, baking soda, and vinegar than I did when I just went at it with soap and water. The famous combo won again—or so I thought.

The reason it was so much more effective, though, is because the true cleaning power was likely coming from the lemon juice at best and the sheer wetness of the solution at worst, not the baking soda and vinegar. In fact, these two products cancel each other out, according to some pro cleaning websites I read and Reddit threads I browsed.

Baking soda is a base, vinegar is an acid, and when bases and acids get together, they neutralize each other. The results are water, carbon dioxide (which escapes in the form of fizz), and a salt called sodium acetate. The vinegar and baking soda are reacting with each other, not with your dirty surface, which is why this combination is usually no better a cleaner than water. You're really just wetting and (hopefully) scrubbing, not cleaning. If that's all you want to do, fine. If you want to actually clean, you'll need soap or something else to make a difference.

What to use instead of vinegar and baking soda

First of all, don't overlook the power of bubbles. The classic trick of pouring baking soda down the drain and following it up with vinegar produces a lot of them, for instance, and while that doesn't really do much to battle actual clogs deep in the pipes, it can bubble out some dirt closer to the surface, at least.

Second of all, vinegar and baking soda do each have a purpose in your cleaning arsenal. Think of this like an amicable divorce: They work better separately, but they're both still great on their own. Vinegar's gentle acidity can sometimes loosen grime from surfaces when you aren't ready to reach for the big guns like, say, a hydrochloric acid-based toilet bowl cleaner.

Baking soda makes a great scrub because of its rough, gritty texture, and is also a solid odor eliminator, which is why you probably have an open box in the back of your fridge already.

If you're looking to replace what you thought were the cleaning effects of baking soda and vinegar mixtures, just opt for regular cleaner. I've had great results with the double-concentrated formulas of Fabuloso and Pine Sol and they're not very expensive. If you liked the feeling of scrubbing those abrasive, gritty bubbles into surfaces, consider plain soap and water on a sponge or, if the material can handle it, steel wool.

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