What Is the Best DIY All-Purpose Cleaner Recipe?

Why do most DIY cleaner recipes not work?

Because the two most shared recipes on the internet destroy themselves in the bottle. Before any recipe is worth writing down, those two need to go.

Vinegar plus baking soda. This is an acid and a base. Acetic acid donates a proton to bicarbonate and you get sodium acetate, water and carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide is the fizz everyone finds satisfying. When the fizzing stops, what is left in the jar is a salt dissolved in water. As one chemist put it, the result “is not any different from just adding the same amount of table salt to some water and then using that to clean” (The Conversation). The mechanical agitation can help shift debris in a drain if you pour them in one after the other, in place. Stored in a sealed spray bottle it is a useless cleaner and a mild pressure hazard.

Vinegar plus castile soap. Castile soap is a true soap, the potassium or sodium salt of plant fatty acids, and it is alkaline. Add an acid and you unsaponify it: the soap converts back to free fatty acids and you get a whitish, curdled, greasy film. Not dangerous, just worse than either ingredient on its own, because you have neutralised both (Lisa Bronner).

There is a third one worth killing while we are here. Adding tea tree or oregano oil does not turn a homemade spray into a disinfectant. No home-mixed essential oil preparation is registered as a disinfectant in Canada, there is no validated contact time or stability data, and the oils are not water soluble so they sit on the surface of the mixture rather than distributing through it.

The working principle behind every recipe below: keep acids, bases and surfactants in separate bottles and use them for separate jobs.

What are the three recipes that actually work?

Three bottles cover almost everything in a house. These are the ratios we use when we make something up on site rather than reaching for a commercial product.

1. The everyday all-purpose spray (a surfactant, alkaline). One teaspoon of unscented liquid castile soap in 500 mL of warm water. Shake gently, do not whip it into foam. This is your counter, table, appliance exterior, painted surface, cupboard door and light switch spray. Soap works by surrounding greasy soil so it can be lifted and rinsed away, which is why it handles kitchen film that an acid spray just slides over. It is also safe on natural stone, because it is not acidic.

2. The descaler (an acid). Either white vinegar cut 1:1 with water, or one tablespoon of citric acid powder dissolved in 500 mL of warm water. This is for limescale, hard water spotting, soap scum, kettle elements, shower heads and glass. Citric acid is the better of the two: it is a chelator as well as an acid, so it grabs and holds calcium ions in solution, which makes it more effective per gram than its acidity alone would predict. It also ships dry and does not smell like a chip shop. Never let this bottle near the surfaces in the next section.

3. The scouring paste (a mild abrasive). Three parts baking soda to one part water, mixed to a spreadable paste. Baking soda sits at about 2.5 on the Mohs hardness scale, softer than glass, porcelain and most enamel, so it scours without scratching. This is your sink, tub, cooktop and stubborn-ring tool. It is also a weak base, pH around 8.3 in solution, which is why it deodorises acidic smells.

An optional fourth for heavy grease: washing soda, sodium carbonate, pH around 11. It is a genuine degreaser and water softener and it belongs on oven interiors and range hood filters. It is also a skin and eye irritant at working strength, so wear gloves, and keep it off aluminium, waxed or unfinished wood, and fibreglass.

Where does vinegar actually cause damage?

This is the part that DIY recipe posts skip, and it is the part that costs people money.

• Marble, limestone, travertine and calcareous stone generally. Permanent etching. The Natural Stone Institute states that products containing vinegar “may dull or etch calcareous stones” (Natural Stone Institute). Vinegar sits around pH 2.5 and dissolves the polished calcium carbonate surface. The dull spot cannot be cleaned off. It has to be re-polished. The recommended cleaner for natural stone is neutral, pH 7, with pH 7 to 8 safe across all stone types.
• Granite. Not recommended as a routine cleaner. It degrades the sealer over time, which leaves the stone more prone to staining even though the granite itself is not calcareous.
• Unsealed and cementitious grout. Acid attacks the cement binder. This is the one people get wrong most often, because grout is exactly where they want to spray.
• Hardwood floor finishes and waxed or oiled wood. Repeated acid exposure dulls polyurethane and breaks down wax.
• Rubber seals and gaskets. Dishwasher, washing machine and fridge door seals degrade with repeated acid contact.
• Aluminium and cast iron.
• Screens and anything with an oleophobic coating.

If your kitchen has stone counters, the practical rule is simple: the soap bottle goes on the counter, the acid bottle never does. And if you already have a dull patch on marble, no cleaner will bring it back. That is a stone restoration job.

What about disinfecting, and what about scent?

Neither of these belongs in a homemade bottle.

Nothing in the three recipes above disinfects. When Rutala and colleagues tested home products against potential human pathogens, vinegar eliminated fewer than 3 log10 of S. aureus and E. coli, and baking soda fewer than 3 log10 of every pathogen tested, against 5.6 to 8.2 log10 for registered disinfectants (Rutala et al.). That is fine, because cleaning is what most surfaces need. When you do need to disinfect, use a product with an eight-digit Health Canada DIN, as covered in how to disinfect without bleach.

On scent, we leave it out and we would suggest you do too. Health Canada’s Healthy Home Guide tells Canadians to “minimize the use of scented products, such as plug-in or aerosol deodorizers (air fresheners)”, because they “hide odours by producing VOCs” that “can cause breathing problems, headaches, and irritation to the eyes, nose and throat” (Health Canada). Essential oils are not exempt from that logic. Citrus and pine oils are terpene sources, and terpenes react with indoor ozone to form formaldehyde and ultrafine particles.

There is a pet problem too. Cats lack the liver enzyme glucuronyl transferase and cannot efficiently clear phenolic and terpenoid compounds, so oils that a dog tolerates can be serious in a cat, and cats groom whatever lands on their coat (Merck Veterinary Manual). If there is a cat in the house, an unscented bottle is not a preference, it is the safe default.

Two last housekeeping rules. Label every bottle with what is in it and the date, because an unlabelled clear liquid under a sink is a hazard. And keep the concentrates locked away: Health Canada advises keeping household chemicals “locked away and out of reach and sight of children and pets.”

When is DIY not enough?

Homemade bottles are good at maintenance and poor at recovery. They struggle with baked-on oven carbon, deep grout discolouration, hard water etching that has already bonded to glass, and anything that has been left for a year. They also carry no safety data sheet, which matters if someone in the house has asthma or a fragrance sensitivity, and no performance testing behind the ratio you happened to mix.

For our own work we use commercially formulated products with published ingredient and safety information rather than mixing on site, and we list them on our eco-friendly cleaning page so anyone can check what is coming into their home. If you would rather hand the whole thing over than keep three bottles under the sink, our pricing page has the real numbers. And if the real problem in your house is limescale rather than grease, start with removing hard water stains without harsh chemicals instead.