Are they just fooling solutions?
In: Chemistry
> homemade cleaning solutions call for a mixture of an acid (vinegar or lime juice) and a base (baking soda)?
Never seen this. It is usually one or the other.
Cleaning chemicals can be quite strong chemicals and you should not mix them unless you know the chemistry behind this. It is very easy to accidentally make toxic gas or fire by mixing the wrong chemicals. You are right about mixing base and acids. But the chemical reaction between these is often quite energetic and can produce other gases such as hydrogen gas. And this is probably what the home made solutions is trying to do. The heat will certainly help dissolve things. This is how many drain cleaners work. But you should be careful about this as it is possible to get things too hot and damage it and possibly set it on fire.
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On the back of an ammonia bottle I found a recipe for what I call Yellow Magic. 1 part baking soda, 2 parts vinegar, 4 parts ammonia, top off with water. While I do understand the chemistry involved here, I would swear it works better than just ammonia and water. This is my all-purpose degreaser and it costs pennies per bottle to make, so I don’t sweat it. But I do wonder why I’m doing it.
You are correct and the vinegar and baking soda immediately neutralize each other.
Those solutions are written by people who don’t understand chemistry, think “the fizzing means it’s working!”, and don’t realize they’re essentially just cleaning with water (which is a perfectly good solvent for many messes). Then they get repeated from blog to blog as everyone just copies what everyone else is saying.
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