Eli5: How come some homemade cleaning solutions call for a mixture of an acid (vinegar or lime juice) and a base (baking soda)? Doesn’t that turn into water and salt?

Question

Are they just fooling solutions?

In: Chemistry

Answer 1

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.