Clean and seal your grout perfectly with green chemicals

Grout is like teeth.  The two very effective cleaning agent is baking soda and hydrogen peroxide.  Dry or paste baking soda helps to polish away trapped dirt and especially grease.  Hydrogen peroxide bleaches.  I always know that.  If your grout is white for example, you can get back the original color as white as you want.  The problem is the amount of work and the amount of hydrogen peroxide to use.  Now I made it perfect.

First option.  You add first-aid 3% hydrogen peroxide slowly into baking soda powder.  You just add enough to "wet" all the powder and obtain a paste.  For horizontal surface you can make the paste thinner.  Now you just need to apply the paste on the grout.  The hydrogen peroxide will stick and bleach much longer than if you spray the liquid onto a vertical wall.  If helps if you brush the paste into the grooves to get rid some of the grease and dirt first.

You rinse or just wipe when dry.  Residue baking soda is eatable and safe.  Hydrogen peroxide turn into water and oxygen.  If your grout is white, the residue baking soda actually makes your grout look snow white.

Water tends to separate from the baking soda paste.  You can add something like a little guar gum or xathan gum to the mixture at room temperature to thicken and stabilize the mixture.  If you use corn starch, you probably have to warm or heat the hydrogen peroxide first to get a gel.

Option two.  Hydrogen peroxide plus acid is a bleach.  The hydrogen peroxide is more table is acid.  Citric acid crystal from food supplies is a good acid.  A one pound bag doesn't cost that much and last a very long time.  One teaspoon per cup of hydrogen peroxide (or water) is a stronger acid than vinegar.  You can make a much higher concentration acid until the crystals no longer dissolves.  Now you need to thicken the bleach to save peroxide.  It's a few dollars a quart but you have walls and walls of tile in the bathroom, kitchen or the floor.

I get the idea from computer preservation enthusiast.  They thicken peroxide to work on plastic shells of old computers.  I already told you.  The warm or heat the peroxide in the microwave.  Then add corn starch or other starch to make a gel of peroxide.  You can add guar gum or other gum in room temperature.  You save gums if you warm the peroxide too, and it works better.  You will use a lot less gum than starch.  Just don't add baking soda to the acid as it will react.

It's perfectly safe to heat the peroxide.  The peroxide will decompose faster but still in a slow rate compared to the bleaching.

In this option the ingredients are all natural and biodegradable.

Now the difficult part is sealing of the grouts once it is clean.  There are plenty of grout sealants to choose from if you don't mind the toxicity.  Pick one that whitens as well as sealing.  Then you don't need to worry whether the grouts are clean enough for sealing.  And you don't need to match the color of the grout in various shades of white.

I was wondering if there's anything naturally non-toxic for my kitchen counter?  Easy to apply but do not need to be permanent?

Simple - wax!  I actually tried before to use a candle to seal the grouts.  I gave up.  You cannot rub the candle wax into the grooves.  And you cannot melt the wax by burning the candle - too much soot.

Just happen I have emulsifying wax NF at hand so I tried.  You have to melt it and pour onto the grouts.  Then recover the excess wax that solidifies.  You cannot spread the wax easily because the tile will cool and solidify the wax.  It will have a lot of waste and inconvenient.

I have the almost perfect solution.  The wax comes in small peas.  You just put a pea on the grout and melt it with a gas lighter type barbeque lighter.  The wax will melt and follows the tip of the flame down the groove.  The wax stays white when solidifies.  You can use organic white bees wax if you want.  It's at even higher melting point.  This lighter method seems to be much better than direct pouring, when the wax solidifies as soon as it touch the cool surface.

Since grout is very porous, I doubt if you can easily get rid of all the wax.  Initially the whole groove is covered by wax.  It's unlikely you can melt the wax by any hot objects unless you pour boiling water on the wax.  How often does that happen?  If that happens you can "repair" the wax in no time.

So far the wax stays in the grooves, translucent white in deeper grooves.  When there is wax, no way can dirt get in there or stain the grout.

It's not a quick to seal with wax.  But it's pleasant and you can spread the work in as many stages as you want.  The area of the kitchen counter that you prepare food isn't that big.

Perfect carpet cleaning with perfectly safe ingredients

Now I have done all the experiments.  Firstly, the cleaning agents are not as important as the cleaning tool.  You do have to get one of the carpet "steamers" - not hot steam but will apply shampoo on the carpet and then suck it up.  Without it you have to soak the wet dirt up with a micro fibre or just cloth.  For removing stain in a small area it's perfectly OK.  It's just don't worth the manual labour if you can get a cheap steamer for smaller areas.

Now the cleaning agents.  Of course baking soda.  First you optionally spread baking soda around the carpet, more on dirty areas and stains.  You just drop a scoop in mid air and it will spread pretty evenly when the powder hit the ground.

Now spray the dirty area and stains with white vinegar,  neat or diluted.  It depends on how dirty your carpet is and how much you want to spend on vinegar.  It's cheap but still a couple of dollars per gallon.  The chemical will produce an acid temporary for extra cleaning.  The resulting neutralized salt is slightly yellowish.  It doesn't stain but if you have pure white carpet, I would try in a small area first.

Now the ingredient for carpet shampoo.  Add a cup of vinegar to it, more or less if you want.  Optionally add a cup of rubbing alcohol to it.  Optionally you need a little bubble, if only you need it to see how much dirty water is being sucked back into the steamer.  You can mix with carpet shampoo, but test first if there is adverse or mutual suppressing reactions.  You can add an oz or two of laundry detergent.  Or, I have an ultimately biodegradable car shampoo with very low suds.

Then follow the steamer instructions to clean the carpet.  Put it simply, for the first pass backwards, press the button to apply "shampoo".  Then at least pass a few times along the same area to suck back up all the shampoo.  Don't reapply shampoo unless you suck up all the shampoo that can be sucked up.  If the carpet get too wet, it will affect all the glue in all the layers.  The carpet may get loose or be damaged.

You can replace the steamer by hand.  But when I dispose of the used shampoo bucket, I always have a dark grey bucket of dirty water.  The dirty water is still very dirty even if I wash in consecutive days.  So that's the power of the steamer.

One thing to watch is that the baking soda from the carpet can "clog" the dirty water circulation.  If that happens you just need to rinse the dirty bucket in warm or cold water.  Baking soda is soluble in water.  For this clogging reason I don't use baking soda as shampoo.  But I think you can, but then don't add vinegar to neutralize it.

I had a Hover steamer, the biggest I could get.  It was a mistake.  It's so heavy to lift upstairs.  Yes you can separate the buckets from the steamer before lifting but that's extra work.  Even the to and fro action need some muscle if you go over the whole house.

My steamer clogged long ago, with fibre and dirt from the carpets.  It it also leaks from the tool tube.  I cleaned it up, took it apart, and realized that the clog can easily be cleaned if you dissemble a few parts.  It didn't look promising.  The seal ring broke into two pieces.  But when I put it back together, it works.  The leak is just a design fault, putting stress on the tube all the time.  You can use tape to stop the leak if nothing else.  The tube is for the hand tool, a mini steamer for the stairs, which is impossible for the full steamer to get on.

I'm not a fan of Hover but they do have supply of parts and repair if you need.

Homemade carpet cleaner so good that it remove stains

I have a so called carpet steam cleaner.  It's too big too heavy and too troublesome to use.  And it's not that good.

People put baking soda on their carpets to clean.  People put vinegar solution on their carpets.  Some people put both.  The question is how good it is and how practical than carpet shampoo and steam cleaners.

After hand wash using microfiber cloth only, it's as good as oxiclean!  And I tried at the heavy traffic area that looks almost black.  Originally it's beige. We use to use oxiclean solution to remove stains.  The problem is that it will create a light spot on the old carpet.  After the baking soda and vinegar treatment, it's the same color as the oxiclean treated spot.

Now the practical process.  Sprinkle baking soda all over the carpet.  Work the power evenly with a brush, or use the electric brush of a steamer.  Spray the carpet slightly wet with a solution of 1 part warm water and 1/4 part distilled vinegar.  Then use a brush to clean like a shampoo, or use the electric brush.  Work more on the stains.  Wipe away wetness and lift the dirt with a microfiber cloth.  I don't even have a brush so I did everything with a microfiber cloth.  It doesn't look much when finished.  But when it's completely dry after a while, it will look the same as treated by oxiclean.

I don't know what's the long term effect on the carpet.  And you should try in a small area first.  But our carpet is almost black and worn out at the high traffic area.

Baking soda is mildly alkaline and itself a good cleaner for grease and water stains on the bathroom.  If you leave it on the carpet it will absorb odour.  It is also an abrasive power but it's too fine and soluble to damage any surface.

Vinegar is mildly acidic, and a good cleaner to dissolve grease and water stain.  You should dilute it because of the smell, and the cost if you buy it from the supermarket.

When they react, carbonic acid is first formed with heat giving out.  I would think that provide extra cleaning effect.  The carbonic acid should be stronger than vinegar and highly reactive.  The carbonic acid will then disintegrate into water and carbon dioxide.  What left is sodium acetate, a salt that is also used to replace salt and vinegar in fish and chips.  A salt is like common salt, which is transparent but white when in power form.  It will not turn into anything or change colour.

I use a microfiber cloth to lift the dirt because in repeated use, the microfiber cloth is less dirty than say cotton.  If the cloth is not too dirty I rinse it once in water.  Once a while I put it in the washing machine.

Update: It is always a mystery of using both baking soda and acid. Actually the reaction absorbs heat. When you combine both you neutralize each other. But many people swear they saw better results and so do I. Now my thinking is that the extra cleaning effect is not chemical, but physical. It's like you rub acid into hard to reach areas of the surface. And the fine baking soda powder do the rubbing.