Natural Cleaning Product Recipes make life around the house simpler, safer and cheaper. There is no downside to making your own household cleaning products.
Making natural cleaning products takes less time than visiting your local supermarket or discount store to buy the name-brand products. I have found natural cleaning product recipes to be as effective, if not more effective than the national brand (full of unpronounceable chemicals). None of the ingredients are mysterious or hard to get. Most are available locally, but I do have my addiction to Amazon Prime, so all of them can also be found there. I will provide links along the way to sources for all the ingredients.
Why you Should Make your Own Natural Cleaning Products
Making your own cleaning products is easy and cost effective. Also, they don’t contain toxic ingredients that are known to cause cancer, impact breathing or brain function. Before I started making my own cleaning products, I would know that I could have a clean house with a hard afternoon’s work and that I would spend at least half of the next day in bed with a migraine headache. While I was cleaning, I would experience ‘brain fog’ and shortness of breath. Even though, it sounds like I am making this up—I assure you that cleaning made me sick–every time.
Here are the links to my posts with natural product cleaning recipes:
The ingredients are basic–vinegar, baking soda, castile soap, olive oil and filtered water. There are add-ins suggested inside each post–things like essential oils, rubbing alcohol and washing soda.
Cleaning Cloths Matter
I have always used old socks, tee-shirts and kitchen towels for cleaning. Until, I found out about the miracles of Norwex and E-Cloths. Also silver impregnated microfiber cloths have antibacterial properties that make me feel better that I’m not spreading germs around every time I wipe off a cabinet.
All three types of cleaning cloths require that you start by wetting the cloth in hot water. Frequent rinses in hot water will keep bacteria at bay. Some studies show that using an anti-bacterial cloth with hot water alone can eliminate 98% of bacteria on a surface. When you add in some of the natural cleaners, you can clean for pennies and be assured that you are getting a deep clean while eliminating bacteria.
I wash all the cloths on the super-hot sanitize setting in my washing machine. They don’t shrink and have held up very well. I do hang them to air dry because dryers do nasty things to any type of microfiber.
Norwex Brand
I like Norwex the best for cleaning cloths. However, ‘the best’ is expensive—so expensive, that I have limited my Norwex purchases to an Amazon Basic Household Pack (Dusting, Windows and Enviro Cloth) and a Kitchen Scrub Cloth. The household pack all contain Baclock and are anti bacterial. The Kitchen Scrub Cloth is not anti-bacterial but performs great on pans and glass cooktops without any scratches.
E-Cloth Brand
E-Cloth is a close runner-up. Their No Scratch Scouring Cloth IS anti-bacterial and it also performs perfectly in the kitchen. It isn’t very absorbent and I don’t use it to wipe down hard surfaces. It is great for washing dishes, rinses easily and dries quickly. Other E-Cloth cloths are great for cleaning but the downside is that they require two cloths for each task. The heavy-duty microfiber cloth cleans and is anti-bacterial. The second, lightweight cloth is to dry to create a streak-free surface. The two cloth requirement bugs me, but, it doesn’t stop me from using E-Cloths.
Sometimes, E-Cloths are available at off-price stores like Ross and Marshalls. I always check when I am in one of these stores as the discounts are deep and you never know what you will find. I have never seen any Norwex available at these outlets.
The third type of cloth that I use, is the silver impregnated microfiber cloths. They are great for wiping off spills, and general cleaning. This type of cloth is widely available on Amazon. Silver impregnated microfiber cloths don’t hold up as long as Norwex or E-Cloth. The last set I bought of silver impregnated microfiber cloths were deep blue. Unfortunately, now all of my cleaning cloths have a blue cast and the silver impregnated microfiber cloths continue to dye everything they are washed with, no matter how many times, that I wash them. There are other colors and brands available on Amazon, but I would advise staying away from the deep blue ones. The link above to Amazon is for ‘not blue’ silver impregnated microfiber cloths.
Bottles, Sprayers and Pumps
I use, Dollar Tree plastic spray bottles for general cleaning where I don’t use essential oils. Colored glass bottles are required for any cleaning solutions that have essential oils. If you don’t like to use plastic spray bottles, the colored glass bottles or glass vinegar bottles (with sprayer inserted) work great. I got a set of 16 oz. blue glass bottles with sprayer from Amazon for a very reasonable price. I also got a set of 8 oz. blue glass bottles with a pump that I use for soft soap and shower body wash. The pumps and the sprayers are interchangeable on both sizes of glass bottles.
Essential Oils
I am cost conscious on essential oils. I shop around but I believe that it is important to use essential oils that are just a distillation of the type of oil selected. For example, lavender essential oil should contain only 100% lavender oil. Make sure that other additives/ingredients aren’t on the ingredient list! Also, if an essential oil is going to be in contact with your skin, make sure that you use organic essential oils. This is important for body wash and body balm.
Hope you enjoy the Natural Cleaning Product Recipes!