Comments on: Saving Pennies or Dollars? Vinegar

By: Natalie

Natalie — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 10:36:49 +0000

I once read in a magazine to mix vinegar with water 50:50 and leave a few days (apparently it goes back to full strength vinegar). Whether or not this is true, I don’t know, but I do it and have four litres of vinegar for $1.09 instead of two, and have for a decade or so. I have seen no noticeable effects of watering the vinegar down, FWIW.

By: Brittany

Brittany — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 02:37:10 +0000

It also repels mosquitoes! Drinking vinegar is pretty horrific, but vinegar pills are one of the most effective mosquito repellents I’ve ever tried (I think they’re marketed at weight loss supplements?). Basically, you sweat vinegar–not the best smelling for polite company, but if you’re going to be in the woods for a while, well worth it.

By: Jade

Jade — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 02:49:31 +0000

According to my grandma, vinegar is good for getting sweat and oils out of your clothes. The fabric softening benefit is nice too, especially for those of us who break out in hives whenever we wear clothes washed with fabric softener.

By: Stacy

Stacy — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 20:33:50 +0000

We use vinegar in the laundry, the dish washer and just about any other in-house cleaning solution. I’m allergic to fabric softener and scented laundry detergents so I’ve never used either. I have considered purchasing a Downy ball and filling it with vinegar.
However, vinegar did NOTHING for our weed problem. Neither did Roundup (even mixed double the recommended strength), rock salt, boiling water, bleach or any other concoction I read about. We would pull by hand and have weeds again 2 days later, even with a weed guard fabric. We finally stumbled onto another weed killer that worked- apparently it contains a different herbicide than Roundup (which our weeds are evidently immune to).

By: Jill

Jill — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 21:53:50 +0000

For unwanted plants in sidewalk cracks, pour boiling water on them. It does a great job and is essentially free.

By: EngineerMom

EngineerMom — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 21:05:14 +0000

Oh, and we don’t use fabric softener. I do run a dryer sheet with our clothes occasionally in the winter to de-static, but that’s about it. Fabric softeners coat the fibers of fabric, rendering them incapable of adequately absorbing water. Since the things that get washed most often around here are towels, cloth diapers, and my children’s clothes (both sensitive to perfumes and dyes), a box of dryer sheets lasts us at least 6 months!

By: EngineerMom

EngineerMom — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 21:01:58 +0000

I also agree with Becky on the safety factor. We switched almost entirely to vinegar, baking soda, and salt as cleaning supplies when we had kids specifically because I didn’t want to have to worry about kids getting into potentially deadly chemicals.

The only things we still use are BonAmi (which is also pretty nontoxic) and Raid for killing wasps.

Toilet bowl cleaner we were able to get rid of when I started cleaning the toilet on a daily basis with a mild soap solution (soap chips dissolved in a bit of water kept in a can with the toilet brush). However, if you don’t clean it daily, you very quickly get back to needing the harsher chemical cleaners!

By: Sara

Sara — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 19:11:12 +0000

I once poured vinegar into the Jet-Dry dispenser of my dishwasher, and at the end of the cycle, there was a trail of rusty residue coming from the dispenser. The same thing happened for months every time I ran the dishwasher! That is one substitution I am not going to try again.

By: valleycat1

valleycat1 — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 19:03:01 +0000

Food for thought: according to an old article (maybe 2010) in the WSJ, “Seventh Generation’s co-founder, Jeffrey Hollender, wonders why more people haven’t stumbled upon laundry’s big, dirty secret: “You don’t even need soap to wash most loads,” he says. The agitation of washing machines often does the job on its own.” The bloggers I saw who picked up on that at the time did their own wash tests & verified that they could get clothes just as clean as usual with very little, if any, detergent. Commenters agreed.

By: SLCCOM

SLCCOM — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 18:26:48 +0000

If your kid gets into Roundup and drinks it, unless s/he uses chlorophyll to get nutrition, nothing will happen.

Seriously, folks, please ONLY use reputable sites for your toxicology information! The National Institutes of Health, PubMed, and WebMD are reputable. Anything that is a .org has an ax to grind and generally is written by people who need to get on Prozac and anti-anxiety medication.

By: graytham

graytham — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 17:36:05 +0000

We’ve been using vinegar in place of dishwasher rinse for years, with excellent results.

We also occasionally add vinegar to the bucket of water when washing floors- it gets rid of the film left by the floor cleaner and leaves the floor very clean and shiny.

We don’t use fabric softener- for years we used those drier sheets, but then stopped doing that too. We don’t see any difference.

By: Ed

Ed — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 16:20:37 +0000

I’m with Kate on this. A thoughtful person can mix the vinegar with a salt water solution to create a highly effective non-carcigenic herbicide.

By: Kate

Kate — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 14:17:35 +0000

RE: Roundup (glyphosate)—
A recent study by eminent oncologists Dr. Lennart Hardell and Dr. Mikael
Eriksson of Sweden, has revealed clear links between one of the world’s biggest selling herbicide, glyphosate, to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form
of cancer.
People wonder why we have such an increase in cancer but they continue to buy this poison.
I vote for vinegar!

By: deRuiter

deRuiter — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 09:02:32 +0000

Can’t see the need for fabric softener myself, dry clothes outdoors in the sun in nice weather, hang indoors when inclement. The constant barage of ads is not really intended to make your life better with “softer” clothing, it is intended to facilitate taking money from your pocket and putting that cash in the pockets of the people who own and run the chemical company which makes Downy Fabrc Softener and all those huge plastic containers in which it is sold, by making you think you “need” chemically softened clothing. Both the Downy and the plastic containers (made from petroleum) are environmentally destructive and if you don’t use them, the environment stays cleaner and you keep more of your own money. On the other hand, vinegar is a natural product and the containers in which is is packaged are very thin walled and recyclable. You can make your own vinegar if you like, from apples.

By: deRuiter

deRuiter — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 08:56:50 +0000

# 15 Cheryl “However, we just learned that the EPA does not authorize use of vinegar to kill weeds.” This is possibly because there is no vinegar lobby to wine, dine and bribe the EPA executives, to donate to the politcal party in charge in exchange for EPA approval. Think how bad it would be for the petro chemical business if Roundup AND vinnegar were judged equally efficient for weed killing! Even the most dense individual would know that vinegar would be less likely to polison their children and their environment than vinnegar, and sales of Roundup would suffer. Always follow the money!

By: SwingCheese

SwingCheese — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 03:53:18 +0000

@8, et al: I, too, made the switch to vinegar for environmental reasons. This was about 3 years before my son was born. But one of the spin off benefits was that, once he became mobile, we really didn’t have to worry about locking the doors under the sink, because all that was under the sink were baking soda and white vinegar. It has worked out well.

By: Cheryl

Cheryl — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 20:16:22 +0000

However, we just learned that the EPA does not authorize use of vinegar to kill weeds.

By: elyn

elyn — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 19:31:14 +0000

I’m not sure why you need to use so much vinegar on the sidewalk plants- I use vinegar in a spray bottle to kill thistle (because pulling thistle makes it multiply), and it is used in exact proportion to how you would use Round-Up. Works excellently. The trick is to do it on a hot sunny day, since the sun works together with the vinegar to singe the plants to death… I agree though, that with grass and such, pulling it up by the roots is far more effective than spraying with anything.
I agree with others that vinegar is extra cheap at Costco, and the uses are just endless. Didn’t know about the Jet Dry replacement idea. I’ll have to try it.

By: Larabara

Larabara — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 19:10:51 +0000

I formerly used Jet Dry in my dishwasher and switched to vinegar with very good results. My dishes are clean with no spotty glasses.

The only problem I have is that Jet Dry had a blue color that would fade to clear in the dispenser window as the dispenser got empty.

Because of vinegar’s clear color, I can’t tell whether I need to refill the dispenser until my glasses get spotty again.

I also use vinegar in my carpet cleaner, in the wash and rinse, to eliminate pet stains and odors. When the carpet is damp, it smells like vinegar, but dries to no smell at all. And the pets don’t re-stain the cleaned areas.

And I’ve been putting half a cup of vinegar in my laundry rinse cycle for years, with very good results there as well.

By: Kerry D.

Kerry D. — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:57:25 +0000

Beyond the likely cost savings, I think using vinegar is very worthwhile considering decreasing the toxicity to people/pets/environment and just the utter simplicity of one bottle in my cupboard that can do so many things.

I echo that at Costco, two gallons are just over $3.