pet urine, whiskey, perfume, you can use white vinegar to get rid of most smells on most materials: carpets, furniture, clothes, without damaging the material.
vinegar is amazing at breaking down odors and then evaporating and not leaving a trace.
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I use vinegar for all cleaning in my house except pet urine. Vinegar will clean dog urine okay, especially in the laundry. But you GOTTA use an enzymatic cleaner for cat urine or take it out to bake in the sun for days.
i used vinegar for cat urine for years without a problem, but I have heard that the enzymatic cleaners work well.
On fabrics? I guess I should clarify I meant any fabrics or carpet. Vinegar does a good job as a last step because I always put it in the second wash (after the enzymatic cleaner) to get any smell that survived.
I’ve tried vinegar on cat urine on carpet and it didn’t dent the smell. Did get the cat spray on walls okay though.
With carpet it depends on how deep it went. If it’s a big spot, chances are it’s through the padding and maybe even subfloor, and the odor comes back if not completely neutralized. I’ve had to pull up and replace padding before in spots because once it gets in that stuff, it’s hard to get out. The carpet itself isn’t the problem.
Also, once you’ve seen underneath a carpet/padding that has some age to it, you won’t want carpet again. It’s no wonder odors linger.
Instructions unclear, bathed myself in white vinegar and I still seem to smell weird.
It’s in another comment, just keep dousing yourself over and over ad infinitum.
it should be fine or you might dissolve.
And it’s generally pretty cheap in bulk jugs. Good for laundry too.
definitely, vinegar has so many uses.
i’m trying to focus on one per post, if i listed all of the uses I think the post would sort of lose effectiveness.
Pet urine+whiskey+perfume sounds like a night to remember!!!
Or a Furry orgie
Yes, it will replace it with vinegar smell. I use it for cleaning places with lyme and windows, and when I’m done the place smells like a pickle factory.
White vinegar dries odorless; the acetic acid smell goes away after the vinegar dries.
you’ll deodorize whatever other smells there are, then when the white vinegar dries, you’ll have no smell left.
If you’re cleaning and then leaving while the windows, scrubbed lyme or the scrubs you are using are still not completely dry, you’ll smell the acetic acid of the white vinegar.
If you go back after things are dry, you’ll notice there’s no lingering odor.
Yep, my only point is while it’s drying the smell is less agreeable than other perfumed cleaning products.
got it.
I prefer waiting a few minutes for odorless non-toxic stuff.
commercial detergents or sprays are usually oil-based and that smell lingers. but when the petrochemicals are flower or lemon-scented, people don’t mind so much.
I’ll just drown it all in vinegar!
I do prefer vinegar and also wonder why people bother with other stuff for mirrors and glass surfaces.
I think it’s entirely the fault of marketing that people aren’t aware of many effective and simple alternatives.
But if it gets damp the gross vinegar smell comes back! Disgusting.
nope, it doesn’t!
when vinegar dries, the acetic acid which is responsible for the vinegar smell evaporates, so it’s completely gone after the vinegar dries.
If you still smell vinegar, then your vinegar has never dried, and is lingering in the middle of a futon or mattress or other thick padding.
If you have a dehumidifier, you can make sure whatever you pour the vinegar on is completely dry.
then there’s no smell and the smell won’t come back because the acetic acid has evaporated.
awww haha, I remember you.
you digging through my history?
it’s interesting, I’ll give you that.
Oh sorry I didn’t mean to dig,at least not past the last conversation. I’m trying to watch TV at the same time as I Lemmy on my phone. I wondered how I wound up in vinegar. But I do have strong feelings about it because it was supposed to take a smell out of some towels, and after one wash with vinegar they smelled like vinegar forever, every time they got damp, after several washes and drys. It was worse than whatever I was trying to get out, I finally threw them away.
“Oh sorry I didn’t mean to dig,at least not past the last conversation.”
you’re claiming you made the mistake of looking at my posts instead of the comments we’ve been exchanging back and forth and then again accidentally scrolled down 12 posts, didn’t notice that it was a completely separate post with other threads that had nothing to do with what we were talking about, and then you only referenced vinegar specifically and coincidentally on that same post even though it has nothing to do with what we were talking about?
doesn’t really check out.
sounds like you’re a little embarrassed about being called out for digging through old posts irrelevant to the topic.
like I said, I have a pretty good history, so you don’t have to be embarrassed, but you might want to find a better misdirect than you not understanding how vinegar or laundry works.
since acetic acid (the vinegar smell) evaporates after it dries, it sounds like you either didn’t use vinegar or you didn’t dry your towels properly.
not doing your laundry correctly is such a weirdly specific topic to address 12 posts deep.
you can either wash the vinegar out or dry your laundry properly.
I actually have another theory, but it’s another life hack I’m posting in a few days and I don’t want to spoil anything.
tune back in soon!
I went to your name to trace back how we’d gotten started on the conversation, was interrupted by other events, came back to my phone and flicked down the page, and saw “vinegar” which caught my eye because strong opinion.
You know the meme of the old lady peering at the screen through her granny glasses? Basically me but on my phone.
Washing in a washing machine, added white vinegar to the rinse water, dried fully in the dryer, vinegar smell permeated the washer/dryer room but it’s in the basement of the apartment building and the towels seemed okay so I didn’t worry about it. But as soon as the towels were used the smell returned. I washed and dried them again, no vinegar, just scentless Tide pod, again the smell returned when they were used and got damp. I don’t use vinegar on anything else in the bathroom nor on myself, because I don’t like the smell. I think people who do like it should go ahead and use it, because it’s effective at cleaning and killing mold, but I don’t and I won’t.
I’m going to try to get back to “Top of Last 6 Hours” and stay there, but it’s possible we’ll run into each other again. No enmity intended, just a different experience leading to a different opinion. Have fun!
And again, good on you for having voted already. Much more important than towels. My vote counts for not much, being in a deep blue district of a blue state with a large population, but I have family in PA who also voted for Harris.
gpt it. it sounds like the lingering vinegar has been tied up with your detergent’s bonding agent, which stays on fibers for multiple wash cycles after being used once.
If you mix vinegar into oil or alcohol, it can get stained into fibers, but if you completely dry and then throw it under the sun for the afternoon, flip it over to make sure all of the acetic acidd bonded into the fibers gets a chance to evaporate, that vinegar smell will go away.
it’s all tied to that one compound evaporating.
If you wash your towel once with the detergent and then wash it three times with no detergent, you’ll still have that slight deyergent smell because of the bonding agent in the detergent.
PA resident here, coincidentally.
have a good rest of your day,; i appreciate your explanation.
