Baking Soda and Vinegar

Can you imagine the feeling of doing away with all the garbage smell you capture in your neighborhood. Or in case of your own home at times there is a foul smell releasing from your refrigerator or cupboards, what action do you take to do away with it? Well try using baking soda along with vinegar and see what happens! Any sort of room fresheners, bathtub cleaners, deodorizers and stuff like that would be unneeded to keep at home. Vinegar and baking soda are totally an inexpensive common household products which can beat even if you invest a sack full of cleaning products in your house. Earlier in olden days when there were not many household cleaning supplies invented in real, people persisted for long in simplicity. That's when they combined these two products and made use of them efficiently.

About Baking Soda
It's not only to cleaning toilets and doing away with foul smells that baking soda is solely intended for, it is capable of doing other stuff too. Like removing colors of paint and crayons from the floors, walls or any surface. Its abrasive properties works the way through. All you have to do is mix baking soda with water, create a paste and utilize it. Besides this, it functions in neutralizing acids while cooking. Baking soda is an alkali in nature. In case of an injury during an accident, sprinkling a pinch of this powder would do away all the pain. It's no harm at all to use baking soda and vinegar for drain cleaning, at least the drain clogging problems would be resolved to an extent. Another case about baking soda utilization is on smelly carpets releasing the most foul smell. In such a case, sprinkle the powder overnight on the carpet and brush it or vacuum it the following morning. Your job of carpet cleaning is done!

About Vinegar
Most of the time you must have used this substance called vinegar to sprinkle over delicious salads and savvy dishes, well there is more to it than just this. Vinegar is widely known as a glass cleaning agent. Mixing a quart of water with this substance gives a mixture which would clean the glass and make it clear as a crystal! In my house, I remember my grandpa would soak his dentures in the vinegar overnight and brush it away with the paste of baking soda and water in the morning. This would help take out all the taste of vinegar from the teeth and whiten them to an extent. The essence of vinegar is too strong. As strong as to remove the effect of a burning smell like fire or a cigarette smoke.

The Mixture of the TWO
Now that an individual highlighting of the two separate components have been done, let's talk about what happens when they are together? Since by nature baking soda is an alkali and on the contrary vinegar is an acid- a mild bleaching agent, thus they annihilate one another. The combination of the two results is carbonic acid- which creates foams in nature. Carbonic acid is known to disintegrate into carbon dioxide and water. With this foaming effect, these two can be used as slow drain cleaning process or for any sort of carpet or upholstery smell removal.

So how do you like the two's company? Is it better than the one or too less crowded than the three?! I mean to say, is cleaning with baking soda better alone or cleaning with vinegar and baking soda both good? Well, talking about all the good stuff in this article, this context seems never-ending. But at least you have got the basic idea about both the products and how ideal it is to expend on daily basis.

The Chemical Reaction
Now that this subject is knee deep into the field of chemistry, questions might rise like what does a mixture of baking soda and vinegar yield? Is there an entailing chemical reaction for the same? Well, look below to get all your questions answered..

Baking Soda is (Sodium Bicarbonate): NaHCO₃
Vinegar is (Acetic Acid): CH₃COOH

Combination of the Two is an Acid-Base Chemical Reaction

NaHCO₃ + CH₃COOH -----> CH₃COONa + H₂CO₃

Here in, H₂CO₃ is the final product known as carbonic acid whose property is to decompose into water and CO₂ (carbon dioxide). Elaborating on the same will give:

H₂CO₃ -----> H₂O + CO₂

Here the CO₂ is the reason why all the foaming takes place.

If you throw a glance into the scientific world, all the geeky scientists will have their own explanations to describe and tag the fusion of baking soda and vinegar as 'an explosion'. For them it's a dramatic one with reacting chemicals, but for us it's just another eye-catcher! Now unlike our regular usage, when the combination of these two are used to form some scientific experiments, ensure that you are supervised with all the safety tools.

Experiments Done with Vinegar and Baking Soda

1. Erupting Volcano
2. Bubble Bomb
3. Chemical Reaction
4. Rocket Canister
5. Invisible Ink
6. Blow Up a Balloon
7. Exploding Ziploc Bag

All the way from its solo descriptions to its uses to scientific experiments, I hope my take on this context is satisfactory. So this is where I sign off!