Submitted 8 months ago by snausagesinablanket@lemmy.world to [deleted]
I have plant trays I use in the spring and they get lime deposits from my water. I was looking at cleaning vinegar at lowes last night and it was $27+ a gallon. Regular vinegar is about $4 a gallon. The cleaning vinegar is only around 25%.
No, acetic acid forms an azeotrope with water and they will evaporate together. Buy the concentrated acetic acid or dilute your own with a different acid
Other commenters have good suggestions also, but one option I haven’t seen mentioned would be to buy a powdered acid and make your own dilutions
It’s easy to get citric acid in a dry form (like the crystal coating on sour candy), you can get 10 lbs of it for like $30-50 online. I put a small scoop in my dishwasher to keep my cups from getting foggy from our hard water, and I use it to descale our kettle and in our laundry, too.
Just be careful, acid dilutions are no joke. Whether you get the cleaning vinegar or make a citric acid solution for yourself:
use nitrile or latex gloves when working with the acid solutions
wear something to protect your eyes, glasses are probably good enough but goggles are better
if you have an acid solution and want to dilute it, pour the acid into the water, not the water into the acid!!!
flush your skin or eyes with water immediately if the acid gets on you or your clothes
These rules might seem like overkill but better safe than sorry!
Citric acid is slightly stronger than acetic acid so if I were you I’d make like a 20% solution to have a similar effect to the cleaning vinegar (so like 100 g powdered acid to 400 mL water). You might have to mix it on the stove so that the water is simmering to get the acid to dissolve.
Again, be careful! But as long as you’re smart about it, take your time, and prioritize safety, you can definitely use this for descaling and cleaning (and cooking!)
TIL:
I feel stupid. I just realised why candy rots teeth.
🤯
Oooh it’s even cooler than that!! You’re spot on, acid is the problem. And acid from food, candy, coffee, etc. is harmful for enamel for sure.
But sugary stuff that isn’t acidic also rots teeth. Why? Because the bacteria in your mouth do what’s called lactic acid fermentation. Basically, when they take a sugar molecule and want to make “usable” energy out of it (in the form of something called ATP, or adenosine triphosphate), they end up creating lactic acid as a byproduct. In essence, the stuff living in your mouth makes acid out of sugar.
We also need to break sugar down into ATP, but we do something called cellular respiration instead. It uses oxygen and creates CO2 as a byproduct! That’s why we need oxygen to breathe, and why we breathe out oxygen. But, when you work your muscles hard (lifting weights, sprinting), you might use the ATP in your muscles faster than your body can make it with cellular respiration. In that case, your cells will also do lactic acid fermentation! That’s what we’re feeling when we “feel the burn” (well, that and micro-tears in the muscle, in some cases).
Source: I’m a biologist! And I love sharing weird facts like this! Thank you for the excuse to write this out :-)
If you’re willing to do some very minimal scrubbing you don’t need cleaning vinegar, the city I live in has very hard water and I always just use regular vinegar to deal with limescale. It should work just fine on anything that isn’t horrendously crusted up.
(No, but) you can get far with freeze distillation: chemistry.stackexchange.com/a/6224
Except keep the ice instead of keeping the liquid like in ethanol freeze distilling?
Keep the liquid! Vinegar freezes around -25C
No idea about your evaporation question, but I’ve had success at removing lime deposits by using baking soda. It takes a little patience and scrubbing, but does work.
Have you tried barkeepers friend?
tburkhol@lemmy.world 8 months ago
acetic acid is almost as volatile as water, and the atmosphere contains a lot less of it. If you evaporate vinegar, you’re likely to lose about as much - maybe more - of the acid than the water. So, evaporation is probably not a good way to concentrate vinegar.