Reuse Vinegar for Cleaning Jobs

Vinegar is a great cleaning tool. I buy it by the gallon for cleaning all over the house. However, I use it most often in the kitchen. Depending on how you use the vinegar, you can sometimes reuse the same vinegar. Here is an example of what I did today.

One of my children (it was either "not me" or "I don't know") warmed up some spaghetti in the microwave and did not cover it. Needless to say, they also did not clean it up. So, it hardened and dried. Then another or perhaps the same, burned some popcorn in the microwave. This all left a mess and a smell.

To take care of the situation, I mixed 1 cup of vinegar with 1 cup of water. I put it in the microwave and set it for 7 minutes. At the end of the 7 minutes, I carefully took the very hot mixture out and wiped out the microwave. The dried on sauce came right out, and the burned popcorn smell is completely gone.

Now, that leaves me with 2 cups of vinegar water that can be reused. 1/2 cup of this I ran thru my coffee maker. I do this weekly and when I go to dump out the pot, it will have flaky white specks floating in it. These specks are hard water deposits that the vinegar cleaned out of the inside of the coffee pot. That I then dumped it down the kitchen drain while running the disposal to help freshen the kitchen sink drain.

That still left me with 1 and 1/2 cups of the solution. It is cold and flu season, so I took my husband's and my toothbrushes and put them each in a separate cup with a little of the solution poured over each. That will help disinfect them, as we keep passing a head cold back and forth. (I also have been buying us new brushes every 2 weeks till we get rid of this cold bug).

One cup, I just added to the fabric softener dispenser of my washing machine for a load of laundry that is in it.

The last 1/2 cup I am adding to the rinse aid dispenser in my dishwasher.

Not a drop wasted. There are thousands of uses for vinegar. These are just a few.