Green Cleaning Tips

I've already posted about the cleaning super powers of simple baking soda and regular white vinegar. Now I'd like to add a third cleaner to the list: diet coke.

Here's my experience with it this weekend. When the Karch family grills outside, we like to use our cast iron pans and skillets, but when we pulled our largest pan out this morning (we planned to have an outdoor barbecue lunch) we discovered that it had rusted badly. No idea how since we don't wash them after using them and the one in question was well seasoned. In any case, the thing was coated in rust. Yuck! It looked like a lost cause (wish I'd taken a before picture so I had visual proof to back up this story).

Then I remembered a friend back in college telling me that he'd once stripped clean a rusted bike chain by soaking it in diet coke for an hour. 'Yeah, right," I'd though to myself at the time. But here I was staring at this once beautiful and much loved cast iron pan and I thought to myself, 'It certainly couldn't hurt the situation.'

My husband ran out to Walgreens and picked up a 1 liter bottle of diet coke and a steel wool brillo pad. He got the big chunks of rust off the pan with the brillo first and then poured half of the bottle of diet coke into the pan. We let the coke sit for two minute and then started rubbing the pan with the brillo. Five minutes later you couldn't even tell that the pan had been rusty. It was sparkling clean! I'm not kidding.

I wondered if diet coke would work on the rust around the drain on our ancietnt bathtub. I went inside, stoppered up the tub and poured a quarter of the diet coke that we had left in the bottle into the tub where it settled around the drain. Again, I let it sit for two minutes and then (gently) scraped at it with the steel wool brillo. To my amazement (and repulsion) our drain looks 1000 times better.

I had to share this trick with the rest of you. And for the record, I don't think I'm ever going to drink diet coke again.