Rubbing Alcohol - Your New Favorite DIY Home Cleaner

Rubbing Alcohol – Your New Favorite DIY Home Cleaner : If this pandemic has taught us one thing, it is that rubbing alcohol is a great disinfectant. Whether you use it straight from the bottle or in a form of a gel sanitizer, rubbing alcohol will get your hands or surfaces clean and disinfected.

That being said, rubbing alcohol is not only good for keeping your hands free of Covid. Thanks to its chemical composition, alcohol is great at dissolving oils and dirt in general, which is extremely useful when cleaning your home.

We reached out to professional cleaners at Adriana’s Cleaning Service of San Francisco who shared some of the best uses of rubbing alcohol for home cleaning.

What Is Rubbing Alcohol

It’s important to know what rubbing alcohol is before you actually start using it. The term rubbing alcohol is not really a chemical term, but rather a common name. Rubbing alcohol is not the same thing as the alcohol that people drink. In fact, rubbing alcohol is most likely isopropyl alcohol or methanol.

Both of these substances are more or less poisonous and should not be consumed. They are also all very flammable and evaporative, so using rubbing alcohol in bigger quantities needs to be done in a well-ventilated room.

Antibacterial Soap Replacement

Antibacterial soaps have been all the rage in recent years, and since the pandemic started, their popularity reached new heights. At the same time, plenty of experts are warning us that antibacterial soaps are helping breed super bacteria – germs resistant to antibiotics and antibacterial soaps.

On the other hand, rubbing alcohol doesn’t really have such issues. All you need to do is use rubbing alcohol dissolved in some water instead of antibacterial soap. And if you want to mask the smell, by all means add some essential oils or some other scent of your choice.

Cleaning Metal Surfaces in Your Home

Our modern homes have a lot more metal surfaces than you might initially assume. Think about it, everything from your stove and fridge, to smaller appliances in your kitchen and other parts of your home to things like door handles and kitchen cabinet handles.

No matter if it’s stainless steel, brass or some other metal, alcohol is a great cleaner for it. Unlike some commercially available cleaners, rubbing alcohol really doesn’t contain any abrasive chemical that might damage metal. All you need to do is apply some rubbing alcohol on a cloth, and gently rub the stains and germs away. It works on just about everything from greasy stains to dirt that will be removed readily.

Unfreezing Your Car Windows

Yes, technically, your car is not a part of your home, and unfreezing your windows is not cleaning. But it does work, and it can be important in winter. Add one part of rubbing alcohol to two parts of water to a spray bottle, stir gently, and you’ve got the best window cleaner and un-freezer in seconds.

The best part is that it should work no matter how cold it is. Rubbing alcohol freezes at -128.2°F, so your window cleaner should be good in all but the coldest environments. It also works almost instantly, so you don’t have to wait for your car to warm up, or to scrape your windows incessantly to free them from the ice.

As mentioned before, alcohol is a solvent, even more potent than water. This makes it a great cleaning compound. However, the smell of rubbing alcohol is what often dissuades people from using it. If you can look past the smell, however, you get a really effective and inexpensive cleaner.