I have plant trays I use in the spring and they get lime deposits from my water. I was looking at cleaning vinegar at lowes last night and it was $27+ a gallon. Regular vinegar is about $4 a gallon. The cleaning vinegar is only around 25%.
acetic acid is almost as volatile as water, and the atmosphere contains a lot less of it. If you evaporate vinegar, you’re likely to lose about as much - maybe more - of the acid than the water. So, evaporation is probably not a good way to concentrate vinegar.
From all the Nile Red videos I’ve watched over the years: Azeotrope
Other commenters have good suggestions also, but one option I haven’t seen mentioned would be to buy a powdered acid and make your own dilutions
It’s easy to get citric acid in a dry form (like the crystal coating on sour candy), you can get 10 lbs (enough to make many gallons) of it for like $30-50 online. I put a small scoop in my dishwasher to keep my cups from getting foggy from our hard water, and I use it to descale our kettle and in our laundry, too.
Just be careful, acid dilutions are no joke. Whether you get the cleaning vinegar or make a citric acid solution for yourself:
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use nitrile or latex gloves when working with the acid solutions
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wear something to protect your eyes, glasses are probably good enough but goggles are better
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if you have an acid solution and want to dilute it, pour the acid into the water, not the water into the acid!!!
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flush your skin or eyes with water immediately if the acid gets on you or your clothes
These rules might seem like overkill but better safe than sorry!
Citric acid is slightly stronger than acetic acid so if I were you I’d make like a 20% solution to have a similar effect to the cleaning vinegar (so like 100 g powdered acid to 400 mL water). You might have to mix it on the stove so that the water is simmering to get the acid to dissolve.
Again, be careful! But as long as you’re smart about it, take your time, and prioritize safety, you can definitely use this for descaling and cleaning (and cooking!)
TIL:
I feel stupid. I just realised why candy rots teeth.
- I use citric acid to descale the gunk off my steam humidifier
- That gunk is calcium buildup
- Candy has citric acid
- Teeth have calcium
🤯
Oooh it’s even cooler than that!! You’re spot on, acid is the problem. And acid from food, candy, coffee, etc. is harmful for enamel for sure.
But sugary stuff that isn’t acidic also rots teeth. Why? Because the bacteria in your mouth do what’s called lactic acid fermentation. Basically, when they take a sugar molecule and want to make “usable” energy out of it (in the form of something called ATP, or adenosine triphosphate), they end up creating lactic acid as a byproduct. In essence, the stuff living in your mouth makes acid out of sugar.
We also need to break sugar down into ATP, but we do something called cellular respiration instead. It uses oxygen and creates CO2 as a byproduct! That’s why we need oxygen to breathe, and why we breathe out carbon dioxide. But, when you work your muscles hard (lifting weights, sprinting), you might use the ATP in your muscles faster than your body can make it with cellular respiration. In that case, your cells will also do lactic acid fermentation! That’s what we’re feeling when we “feel the burn” (well, that and micro-tears in the muscle, in some cases).
Source: I’m a biologist! And I love sharing weird facts like this! Thank you for the excuse to write this out :-)
Thank you for the cool information!
This interaction made me feel like I was reading a comment in Reddit 10 years ago, I’ve missed that, thanks for that as well!
Agreed!!
Cellular respiration, the Krebs cycle, oxidative phosphorylation, citric acid cycle, glycolysis… I miss having these processes in my head. I was such a biology nerd once.
Woah! Thank you so much for sharing!!
Hey did you ever do that experiment where you spit in a tube and see how long it takes to turn it acodic enough to damage teeth?
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No, acetic acid forms an azeotrope with water and they will evaporate together. Buy the concentrated acetic acid or dilute your own with a different acid
If you’re willing to do some very minimal scrubbing you don’t need cleaning vinegar, the city I live in has very hard water and I always just use regular vinegar to deal with limescale. It should work just fine on anything that isn’t horrendously crusted up.
You could also buy citric acid, relatively inexpensive and safe as vinegar.
Citric acid is also a pretty solid choice to remove lime deposits. It comes in a small bag and has a texture like really coarse salt. I prefer it over vinegar since it has basically no after taste. Not that would matter in your case.
(No, but) you can get far with freeze distillation: https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/a/6224
Except keep the ice instead of keeping the liquid like in ethanol freeze distilling?
Keep the liquid! Vinegar freezes around -25C
30% vinegar is pretty amazing stuff, I use it on my toilet every 6 months or so. really eats away those organic stains. used it for cleaning metal a few times too, it’s a really solid purchase.
no idea about the evaporation.
No, because the acetic acid (vinegar) will have evaporated as well. It will be slightly stronger but not 20%
Acetic acid boils at ~120 C so less of it will have evaporated than the water but it will still evaporate as well.
As a bonus, entering the kitchen will require protective gear. And you’ll get rid of all kinds of pests in the house.
It might also depend on the relative humidity and, uh, relative vinegar level in the air.
So you’re saying it’ll work if I replace the air with gaseous vinegar? Brb.
Have you tried barkeepers friend?
I would try Bon Ami first. Less toxic (don’t need to wear gloves or worry so much about inhalation) and less abrasive (I’m assuming the plant trays are plastic). But I’m not sure if either would work great on lime buildup; maybe after some vinegar application to soften things up first?
No idea about your evaporation question, but I’ve had success at removing lime deposits by using baking soda. It takes a little patience and scrubbing, but does work.
Citric acid is a good shout, but if you can get hold of sulfamic (NOT sulfuric) acid, it is much faster at removing limescale as it is a stronger acid. It does cost a bit more though…
