Do you have a recipe for cleaning out garbage disposals??

Among all these wacky household cleaning solutions, by far the most popular is baking soda mixed with vinegar. When you mix baking soda with vinegar, it produces quite an exciting reaction. It bubbles up and if you mix too much, it will froth right out of the container.

Perhaps it is this bubbling action that makes people think it is a deep cleaner. All those scrubbing bubbles. It will even clean your oven!

Folks, those bubbles are formed by carbon dioxide gas which is produced by the chemical reaction between vinegar and baking soda. They don’t do anything, in terms of cleaning.

Let’s break this down. Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate. It consists of a sodium atom, a hydrogen atom, and a carbon dioxide molecule. Vinegar is a solution of acetic acid and water, or dilute acetic acid. Baking soda is a base and vinegar is an acid. When you mix together a base and an acid together with a solvent (water in this case), an acid-base reaction occurs. The acid has a proton, a positively charged hydrogen atom, that it would love to get rid of. The base would love to get ahold of a proton. So, in this case, the acetic acid gives up a proton to the sodium bicarbonate.

Since the baking soda is actually being mixed with water, it breaks apart into a sodium ion and a bicarbonate ion. The acetic acid gives up its proton (a hydrogen atom) and carbon dioxide gas (the bubbles) and sodium acetate are formed (acetate salt). Since the carbon dioxide is simply bubbling off into the air, what you are left with is sodium acetate and water. Basically, you have water and a little salt. Either the baking soda or the vinegar would have been much more effective on their own!

Ann I thank you for taking the time to answer me. I checked out the first link you gave me and that is the one I decided would work for me.

Kathy Gunter Law I thank you so much for answering me. Up until today I didn't even know this question/answer part existed because I was so intent on getting as many suggestions as I could for home remedies for cleaning different things.

Thank you also Annie for the suggestion to put a lemon in the disposer to "freshen it up" a little. Great idea which I will do.