Soak Up Stains With Salt
Posted on February 18, 2008 by
I’ve been a little lax about scrubbing the kitchen sink lately. It’s old white porcelain and soaks up stains like nobody’s business. If I keep up with it, a gentle all purpose cleaner is enough to get the stains out, but when I let it go, it’s usually time to bring out the big guns.
I used to bite the bullet and use a bleach cleaner when the sink got bad, but in addition to being very un-green, bleach cleaners also irritate my lungs.
The sink had a variety of yellowish stains. To make matters worse, we had blueberry pancakes on Sunday, so there was a big purpley-blueish splatter stain right in the middle of the sink where I accidentally dropped some defrosted blueberries.
I remembered hearing something about using salt to absorb a red wine stain and wondered if it would work for blueberry juice. It works for a lot more than blueberry juice. I rinsed the sink out and sprinkled salt around it while it was still wet. After leaving it for about 5 minutes, I scrubbed, rinsed, and repeated. The salt worked magic. And all I used was salt — no other cleaners, no bleach. No need to take my inhaler. No damage to the environment. No plastic bottle. And it worked just as well as a bleach cleaner would.
Damn, I’m going to try that on my white porcelain sink tonight! As soon as I get around to last night’s dinner dishes…
That sounds like a great tip, but what a pain in the butt it must be to have a sink that stains! That’s the one place you’re supposed to be able to put things that will make a mess!
I would kill for a stainless steel sink. When we were looking at the house, I loved the way the porcelain sink looked, but now it just drives me nuts.
Good luck, Noelle!
That’s great to know about salt. I have used baking soda to absorb stains before, great to know salt is another alternative.
[...] Salt. I had horrible stains and splatters on my stainless steel tea pot and used salt to scrub it with amazing results. I used hot water to rinse, but made sure the salt was still granulated and not dissolved for extra scrubbing power. To read more about using salt as a cleaner, check out this older post. [...]
A frugal and green friend of mine uses a mixture of salt, borax and washing soda (I’m not sure of her proportions … I need to ask, so I can start doing this!) in place of chemical scrubbing powders like Comet and such.
Baking soda works miracles. I use it all the time for stains and scrubbing (which isn’t very difficult)pots and pans too!