soap scum in shower

[soap_rat]

I love Crunchy Betty, too! However, in one part of her blog she talks about how she learned that premixing vinegar and baking soda does not add to a product's "power," since that chemical reaction results in a LOT of water and little bit of sodium acetate. It's too bad that she didn't go back through her other recipes and mention that in all of them. Here's the page where she talks about the chemical mix:
http://www.crunchybetty.com/diy-101-baking-soda-vinegar-not-so-much

I'm interested in trying the homemade soft scrub recipe (well, minus the vinegar, or I'll spritz with vinegar after I smear it all over the shower!) but I have been using Barkeeper's Friend, both the powder and the soft scrub, which I find to be very mild and effective for removing hard water scale and soap scum (Chicago has pretty hard water). The active ingredient is oxalic acid, which can cause skin irritation and peeling--but I got that once when I used baking soda without gloves so I personally don't consider that a knock against it.

A friend who loves my salt soap informed me that the salt soap develops a scum faster than my regular soap (she has a soap shelf in her shower that gets hit pretty well by the spray and eventually has a dribble of soap scum going down the shower wall). I wonder if the salt in the bar helps it to create a mineral scale surface for the scum to cling to? Or does the soap dissolve under running water faster because of the solubility of salt? She said she doesn't care about the scum, she just thought it was interesting.

 

[ewenique]

Robert, we used liquid body wash and shampoos that contained detergents like Sodium Laureth Sulfate. A friend of mine who had been using my soap first told me that the soap scum in her shower was much less after switching to my soap. That's when I did a major soap scum cleanup - yuck! After that, the soap scum has been minimal.

 

[AngelMomma]

Works great

Here is my absolute favorite soft scrub recipe. I use it for the bathroom and the kitchen.

1/4 cup borax
½ cup baking soda
½ cup washing soda
½ cup liquid soap
2 Tbsp. white vinegar
30 drops tea tree EO
15 drops lemon EO
15 drops peppermint EO

Mix together dry ingredients. Mix together liquid soap and e.o.s, the add white vinegar and mix well. Add liquids to dry ingredients and stir. Store in covered container.

Thanks again for this recipe. I really like it. I don't have a plain lemon EO and I am being stingy with my Peppermint EO so I didn't use that. But I put in Orange 5x, Grapefruit, Tea Tree and a few drops of Pine. It really smells great and makes cleaning not so a boring job :-D

 

[lsg]

You are very welcome. I think the peppermint gives it an uplifitng fragrance. It is always more fun to clean if it smells good too.

 

[roseb]

Here is my absolute favorite soft scrub recipe. I use it for the bathroom and the kitchen.

1/4 cup borax
½ cup baking soda
½ cup washing soda
½ cup liquid soap
2 Tbsp. white vinegar
30 drops tea tree EO
15 drops lemon EO
15 drops peppermint EO

Mix together dry ingredients. Mix together liquid soap and e.o.s, the add white vinegar and mix well. Add liquids to dry ingredients and stir. Store in covered container.

Almost my exact recipe, except no essence oil (too expensive) and my soap and vinegar measurement are flipped. Works great!!!

 

[Loolee]

I use tetrasodium EDTA at .2% that is 2 grams in 1000 grams of soap and it really does help with soap scum.

from lotioncrafter:

Tetrasodium EDTA
EDTA, Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid is a molecule which complexes metal ions in aqueous environments. It is available in four neutralizations, two of which, Disodium EDTA and Tetrasodium EDTA, are commonly used in the cosmetics. Generally, the choice of which product to use is determined by the pH of your product. Tetrasodium EDTA is recommended for alkaline products, like most handcrafted soap (and can also be used in creams and lotions). EDTA works synergistically with your preservative to improve preservative efficacy. In soaps, it can counteract the defoaming action of hardness ions, reducing soap scum and improving lather.

 

[lsg]

This is the reason I love this forum, no judgmental posts, just sharing what works for us
.:grin:

 

[salgal]

Just want to share a funny experience. I've made my own laundry detergent for about 5 years (love it!). Before starting to make my own soap and learning about the chemistry of things, a blog had recommended to add vinegar to the wash cycle for extra cleaning power. After doing this for a little bit, noticed underarm stains on white t-shirts showing up more and more. One day hubby observed me doing this and remarked that cleaning detergents are purposefully high alkaline and adding vinegar neutralizes the ph. When the vinegar was switched to the rinse cycle instead of the wash cycle the results drastically improved.

 

[Robert]

I love Crunchy Betty, too! However, in one part of her blog she talks about how she learned that premixing vinegar and baking soda does not add to a product's "power," since that chemical reaction results in a LOT of water and little bit of sodium acetate. It's too bad that she didn't go back through her other recipes and mention that in all of them. Here's the page where she talks about the chemical mix:
http://www.crunchybetty.com/diy-101-baking-soda-vinegar-not-so-much

I endorse that article completely, as well as the linked one wherein she shows one application where the mixture really does work: mixing baking soda and vinegar in situ to clean a drain via fizz.

What she says about mixing baking soda with vinegar also goes for mixing vinegar with other alkali such as washing soda or borax. But mixing it with borax won't even produce CO2, so you can't clean a drain that way.

A friend who loves my salt soap informed me that the salt soap develops a scum faster than my regular soap (she has a soap shelf in her shower that gets hit pretty well by the spray and eventually has a dribble of soap scum going down the shower wall). I wonder if the salt in the bar helps it to create a mineral scale surface for the scum to cling to? Or does the soap dissolve under running water faster because of the solubility of salt? She said she doesn't care about the scum, she just thought it was interesting.

A soap "run" like that is different from lime soap scum, and I'd bet the soap that's dissolving faster is making more of it.

 

[lsg]

Thanks again for this recipe. I really like it. I don't have a plain lemon EO and I am being stingy with my Peppermint EO so I didn't use that. But I put in Orange 5x, Grapefruit, Tea Tree and a few drops of Pine. It really smells great and makes cleaning not so a boring job :-D

I used this formula for the first time on my white fiberglass shower which is about 30 yrs old. Before I had been using the formula on everything except that shower. For that shower I had been using a well-known company's "natural" scrubbing paste. I have to say that I am thrilled by the job this formula did on my shower. I wet the shower down first and then used one of those cheap scouring pads and the homemade paste to scour the shower. At the bottom, I saw grey areas that the commerical formula had missed. I can only think that this was because the white vinegar's whitening action. I scrubbed these areas again and behold a clean and shining shower and the shower smells so fresh and clean.

 

[Robert]

I used this formula for the first time on my white fiberglass shower which is about 30 yrs old. Before I had been using the formula on everything except that shower. For that shower I had been using a well-known company's "natural" scrubbing paste. I have to say that I am thrilled by the job this formula did on my shower. I wet the shower down first and then used one of those cheap scouring pads and the homemade paste to scour the shower. At the bottom, I saw grey areas that the commerical formula had missed. I can only think that this was because the white vinegar's whitening action. I scrubbed these areas again and behold a clean and shining shower and the shower smells so fresh and clean.

I can think it was some other property of your formula. The vinegar can't be doing anything with all the alkaline ingredients. Try water instead of vinegar in that formula and see your results.

I know how you feel about your recipe. There are lots of things I and others have done in the lab where we don't know why it works with this formula and not that one. But there are some cases where the science is pretty simple and nailed down, like this one, and it can be predicted with great certainty that making a certain change will or won't do something.

Vinegar does have cleaning action by itself in similar applications. One good thing about using vinegar on fiberglass is that there's no grout for the vinegar to weaken.

 

[lsg]

Robert, we are not going to agree on this so I guess we will have to agree to disagree. By the way, have you tried this formula? If not, why not give it a try?

 

[Robert]

Robert, we are not going to agree on this so I guess we will have to agree to disagree. By the way, have you tried this formula? If not, why not give it a try?

I've used washing soda on soap scum, but I get so little scum here in NYC that it'd hardly pay for me to make up a mixture for that purpose, so rarely would I use it. Fungus is more the concern! I have to clean that off several times as often as I would scum. I do use vinegar to clean it off the shower curtain now, because bleach is bad for the plastic.

What's really great on soap scum is some stuff that's illegal now for the commercial cleaning products: sodium hexametaphosphate (sodium polymetaphosphate glass, soluble), the original Calgon. I took home a 25 lb. bag from a supplier in Nassau County, having bought it for bath salts use, years ago. It's practically nonalkaline, very mild on hands except for the fact that the form I bought it in is very scratchy xtals. Works so fast it hardly needs any rubbing.

I guess I could do some testing by making some artificial soap scum on a surface, but...nah. I can remember only one time doing a scientific cleaning test, and it was at home for an invention project a really strange guy had, but I'm still kept by my confidentiality agreement from saying what the object was. Anyway, I tried testing out a candidate substance I'd picked for the purpose--a sucrose ester surfactant from Sisterna--by a test of my own devising. I coated a cloth with lampblack, which if you've ever worked with you know how messy that is, and then tried cleaning the lampblack off with water vs. the test substance vs. Ivory bar soap by a fairly reproducible hand washing technique. Then after drying I used the cloth as carbon paper, using fingernail pressure on one side to write on paper on the other side, so I could mail them to my client if he ever asked, which he didn't. Ivory soap > sucrose cocoate > water. The project came to naught anyway. Not eager to be a cleaner tester again unless I get paid more than he paid.

 

[PeacefulMom]

Soapy Vinegar

Here's my favorite soap scum buster:

1 part vinegar to two parts Dawn (or generic equivalent) dish detergent in a spray bottle. Works great.

I know this is an older thread, but I just wanted to add to what this person said. Dish soap and vinegar will work WONDERS at keeping the soap scum at bay. But you need two parts *vinegar* and only one part dish soap. The vinegar seems to "boost" the dish soap and it is also very helpful at breaking down the soapy residue and rinsing away any build up on glass left by hard water.

If you find you can't clean as regularly as you would like, at least keep a bottle of vinegar-dish soap in your shower and simply spray it down when you get out. Even if no one else get's on board and helps you spray, it will still cut down on the grimy build up.

**In case anyone else is interested, I use a Vinegar-Water-dish soap mixture to clean my entire house top to bottom. It is the absolute best cleaner I have ever used and (technically speaking) does not need to be rinsed off surfaces (though I still prefer to rinse them) My ratio is 1/4 dish soap : 1/4 water : 1/2 vinegar, actually I use a little less of the dish soap and a little more of the vinegar** Try it and you'll come to associate that soapy-vinegary smell with squeaky cleanness

 

[Hazel]

Hi PeacefulMom,

Thanks for the tip and welcome to the forum. :grin:

 

[robtr31]

I now of people using turtle wax to clean there shower stall, clean it really good then use turtle wax and next time wipes clean , I haven't tried it personal works on the car okay

 

[Sapwn]

Scum can be a piece of art

 

[Hazel]

I now of people using turtle wax to clean there shower stall, clean it really good then use turtle wax and next time wipes clean , I haven't tried it personal works on the car okay

I'd forgotten about this tip. I've also heard that turtle wax makes stalls easier to clean but I've never tried it.

 

[lsg]

Judymoody, I tried your formula, but really did not measure and I added water. I probably got more vinegar and water than I did dish detergent. It worked great on my stainless steel refrigerator and stove. Thanks for sharing.

 

[AngelMomma]

In Love!

Here is my absolute favorite soft scrub recipe. I use it for the bathroom and the kitchen.

1/4 cup borax
½ cup baking soda
½ cup washing soda
½ cup liquid soap
2 Tbsp. white vinegar
30 drops tea tree EO
15 drops lemon EO
15 drops peppermint EO

Mix together dry ingredients. Mix together liquid soap and e.o.s, the add white vinegar and mix well. Add liquids to dry ingredients and stir. Store in covered container.

I had to come back here and tell you once again how in LOVE I am with this! It leaves the bathroom smelling so much fresher than any of the other cleaners that we have previously used. I even used it to scrub my plastic shower liner. I always try to scrub them a few times at least to lengthen their life before having to purchase a new one. The cleaner removed SO much! I will never go back to the other soap scum removers again.