February 23rd, 2008
SHOWERS, TUBS AND SHOWER DOORS
Here’re where the bad boys of the bathroom – rust, mildew and soap scum — hang out, and the most rigorous cleaning task in the bathroom, the scum-veiled shower door, awaits. Getting the door clean is a must at our house because the 12-year-old has seen
Hitchcock’s Psycho and demands a clear view of oncoming predators. But soap scum can be as tenacious as a dog on a bone, or Anthony Perkins on Janet Leigh, and we wondered if we could even find an effective green cleaner for this task.
Happily we did. Ecover Limescale and Soap Scum Remover blasted through the scum to leave our door crystal clean and it did not knock us out with toxic fumes in the process. This cleaner smells fresh, comes out foamy and, like its conventional competitor, requires no scrubbing. It afforded a big logistical advantage over conventional cleaners, whose fumes make cleaning an enclosed shower a game of jump-in
, jump-out.
The other shower door cleaner that worked to cut the film was Seventh Generation’s Natural Shower Cleaner, made with the powerful, but biodegradable, cleaning agent hydrogen peroxide. It smelled great with fragrance from plant essences mandarin oranges and spearmint leaves and left no fumes and no “chlorine footprint.” According to Seventh Generation, a veteran in the green cleaning space, if every U.S. household replaced a bottle of 32 oz. shower cleaner made with chlorine bleach with its 32 oz. hydrogen peroxide cleaner, it would save the environment from more than 1 million pounds of chlorine.
We tried a couple other green options for shower doors, and in one case, we were just miffed about the $5.50 we’d spent for a product that smelled fabulous, but couldn’t cut the scum.
For tubs, we ended up liking the aforementioned concentrates best. Shaklee’s H2 Organic Super Cleaning Concentrate, Planet’s All Purpose Cleaner and the Biokleen All Purpose Cleaner all worked well on our tub. Dilute, swish and/or soak. We had to scrub the rust stains, and we found that a nice cheat here involved a squirt of either the Ecover or Seventh Generation shower cleaners. The nicest aspect of our tub-cleaning exercise, however, was knowing that we didn’t have to obsessively rinse for fear of leaving a toxic residue, which meant we could conserve water.
