As a busy blogging, home schooling mom and wife, life rarely slows down around here. If you are like me, you are constantly looking for ways to spend less time doing the job. If you are looking for some extra time-saving, money-saving practical tips then you’ll want to visit every Tuesday where I have partnered with Good Deal Mama, Jessica’s Coupons, and Rose Knows Coupons (AKA: The Tipsters!) to share our own individual tips that will either help you save time or money, or hopefully even both!
Today’s tip is brought to you by Rose!
Last week, I reached out to my readers asking what they used for hard water stains like the ones shown above. I’ve had this issue for years now due to our hard Wisconsin water and since I’ve never experienced this issue when we lived in city, this was all very new to me. I’ve tried numerous cleaning products including Lime-A-Way and CLR, Mr. Clean Magic Eraser (which did nothing for this issue), and even lots of elbow grease. It never got better, just worse. My counters are crushed quartz so using an abrasive sponge was not an option. I was afraid it would scratch the surface.
There were lots of readers who suggested I soak the area with hot vinegar. I’ve used vinegar plenty of times with laundry, windows, and as an air freshener, but never on hard water stains!
I filled a microwave safe dish about 1 cup full of straight white vinegar. I heated it up until it was hot to the touch and unrolled my paper towel. I then started with one end of the paper towel and put it in the microwave safe dish. After the paper towel soaked up the vinegar, I removed it with a tongs and wrapped it around the faucet, soap dispenser, and dishwasher vent. I repeated this process every 20 minutes or so for several hours by heating the paper towel up in the microwave over and over.
The end result was fewer hard water stains on my counter top! I wouldn’t say it was completely removed, but I didn’t expect that 5 years of hard water stains would come off in just a few hours of repeating this process. There is a noticeable difference and I will definitely continue to remove my hard water stains with this paper towel soaked hot vinegar process!
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I would recommend Lemi shine. I use it in my dishwasher for hard water stains and it works well on my faucets too. It looks abrasive but it dissolves when wet. They have a website and target sells it too.
it might be more effective if you replaced the vinegar each time, because here the vinegar (acetic acid) is reacting with soap scum (some kind of calcium or magnesium bound to long chains of surfactant (soap)), and while not much will get used up, it may be more effective to use fresh acid each time.