February 23rd, 2008
FLOORS
Remember that white tile floor? It is a picky customer. Ecover Floor Soap with 
Natural Linseed Oil got it clean and we were treated once again to some nice, environmentally healthful aromas developed by this Belgium company with 20 years in the eco-friendly cleaning biz. The bottle says it is suitable for tile, marble, concrete and linoleum floors, and we loved it on our porcelain tile floor. After we squeegeed it up with our Dutch rubber broom, the floor shone. No dirt. No residue. Noting the linseed content, we thought it might have a nice moisturizing effect on our wood floors too, but without guidance from Ecover on this, we did not try it.
Biokleen’s All Purpose cleaner also made smooth work of our floor cleaning job, as did the Clorox Natural Dilutible Cleaner. So we began to see why some environmentalists believe that a good concentrate can suffice for most cleaning tasks. They have a point. Do we really need a “tub and tile” cleaner and a toilet bowl cleaner and a floor cleaner, when one good concentrate can multi-task?
(And for wood floors, there’s a natural solution — called vinegar and water — that many folks swear by. We use just water on our polyurethane-treated wood. If you’re lucky enough to have oiled wood floors that escaped the polyurethane, stick with linseed or other natural mineral conditioners.)
TOILET BOWLS
So until we make the leap to using one good soap concentrate for most of our cleaning, there’s Ecover Toilet Bowl Cleaner. It has an awesome pine smell, and if there’s one good place for a scent, it’s in the toilet bowl where it can be left to soak and waft around the bathroom. This Ecover cleaner was too odiferous for certain sensitive noses in the household, but most of us loved it. Oh yeah, it cleaned the toilet bowl too.
If you prefer no smell, however sweet and seductive in your commode, try Planet’s All Purpose or one of the concentrates, after all the water for the dilution is already there. So swish and soak. We tried this with a couple TB cleaners, and frankly, everything pretty much cleans the toilet, unless its got a rust hard water calcification issue. After testing several products our toilet bowl was so clean it gleamed like fine china.
But of course rust never sleeps, and we have to admit we did have some hideouts in the shower and tub areas, if not the toilet bowl. Again, the aforementioned concentrates (as well as the shower cleaners) worked out the problem with a modicum of scrubbing.
The green cleaners we tried didn’t explode into complex chemical reactions like some of their conventional counterparts that promise no scrubbing (but inevitably require some anyway). But then they never promised us a free ride, just a more responsible clean – and on that they delivered.
Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media
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