Special Guest Star – Hydrogen Peroxide

This week in beautiful Austin, I brought a special guest star to my cleans: H2O2!

Being green, we don’t bring chlorinated products (or any harmful chemicals) into our client’s homes. This means we find creative, safe, eco-friendly alternatives to solve issues like The Pink Scourge. It’s that pink tinted bacteria that gathers in the commode bowl and on your shower tiles. It feeds off of low Ph soaps. Well, you can’t solve this problem by cleaning with more soap!

Recently, we discovered that hydrogen peroxide will oxidize the pink scourge to death! H2O2 is the main ingredient in most non-chlorinated bleaches that are available in the grocery store. But hydrogen peroxide is available everywhere and it costs $1 for the 3% solution.

How safe is it? The EPA says that when used at the %3 solution widely available, the rapid decomposition and lack of remaining residue make it safe for humans. The FDA lists it as ‘generally recognized as safe’ for food use. It’s widely used as a pesticide and many people use it to wash produce.

There have been many claims to medicinal uses for hydrogen peroxide. Snopes has a great article that brings common sense caution to these claims.

Our purpose is to clean your home. So the application here is to squirt the H2O2 directly (and undiluted) onto the pink bacteria. This means getting it thoroughly wet and getting up under the rim of the toilet bowl. Then let it sit! You can safely leave it there for quite some time since the oxidization reaction will stop on it’s own. I like to give it a good scrub after about half an hour. You might find you need a second application to get anything you might have missed, but I haven’t seen pink in my toilet for 2 weeks now!

Happy Cleaning!