I've been wanting to test my various cleaning products for a while and finally did it last night. The tests I conducted, corresponding to the jars from right to left in the pics, are as follows:
Furthest right
6) Control - Tap Water
5) PBW in Tap Water
4) Homemade PBW - I used the recipe here [thread]467655[/thread]. It consists of 47% sun oxygen cleaner, 31% TSP/90 (sodium metasilicate), and 27% 7th Gen Dishwashing soap. Used RO water
3) Sun Oxygen Cleaner (walmart knock off of oxyclean versatile) in Tap Water
2) Homemade PBW in tap water
1) Homemade PBW in tap water, but this time I added 2% EDTA to try and help combat my hard water.
Furthest left
Here are the dirty mason jars I used. I tried to dirty them up all pretty evenly using some dme and hop gunk:
I added 1/2 tbsp of cleaner to each of the jars, which is roughly equivalent to 1 scoop of PBW per gallon. All water added was 170F
And they're off!
You can see oxyclean is foaming the most, and my homemade pbw is foaming a little.
And here they are after an hour sitting in my 145F oven to keep the temp up:
And here are the final results:
I thought I might be biased, so I had my roomate blindly inspect them and rate them by how dirty they were. He ranked them:
10 = very dirty 1= very clean
9 - Tap Water
6 or 7- Oxyclean
5 - Homemade PBW
4 - Homemade PBW + EDTA
2 - Real PBW
2 - Homemade PBW + RO Water
I completely agreed with his ranking
Conclusions:
Hard water sucks! Please note that when I say hard water, I mean my tap water is 700ppm TDS, so its pretty bad here in Los Angeles. Even my RO water ends up being about 40ppm TDS.
Using just water was pretty useless as expected.
Oxyclean seems to be kinda useless in hard water as well.
My Homemade PBW is a little better, and adding EDTA improved it slightly.
Real PBW kicks ass in hard water! However, if I use RO water, my much cheaper PBW substitute seems to work equally well.
So there you go, looks like for now I'll be mostly using my homemade PBW with hot RO water. Maybe if I add more EDTA I can use tap water.
I plan on doing this experiment again using all RO water and creating different homemade PBW mixes to find out what is the most effective and cheapest.
Furthest right
6) Control - Tap Water
5) PBW in Tap Water
4) Homemade PBW - I used the recipe here [thread]467655[/thread]. It consists of 47% sun oxygen cleaner, 31% TSP/90 (sodium metasilicate), and 27% 7th Gen Dishwashing soap. Used RO water
3) Sun Oxygen Cleaner (walmart knock off of oxyclean versatile) in Tap Water
2) Homemade PBW in tap water
1) Homemade PBW in tap water, but this time I added 2% EDTA to try and help combat my hard water.
Furthest left
Here are the dirty mason jars I used. I tried to dirty them up all pretty evenly using some dme and hop gunk:
I added 1/2 tbsp of cleaner to each of the jars, which is roughly equivalent to 1 scoop of PBW per gallon. All water added was 170F
And they're off!
You can see oxyclean is foaming the most, and my homemade pbw is foaming a little.
And here they are after an hour sitting in my 145F oven to keep the temp up:
And here are the final results:
I thought I might be biased, so I had my roomate blindly inspect them and rate them by how dirty they were. He ranked them:
10 = very dirty 1= very clean
9 - Tap Water
6 or 7- Oxyclean
5 - Homemade PBW
4 - Homemade PBW + EDTA
2 - Real PBW
2 - Homemade PBW + RO Water
I completely agreed with his ranking
Conclusions:
Hard water sucks! Please note that when I say hard water, I mean my tap water is 700ppm TDS, so its pretty bad here in Los Angeles. Even my RO water ends up being about 40ppm TDS.
Using just water was pretty useless as expected.
Oxyclean seems to be kinda useless in hard water as well.
My Homemade PBW is a little better, and adding EDTA improved it slightly.
Real PBW kicks ass in hard water! However, if I use RO water, my much cheaper PBW substitute seems to work equally well.
So there you go, looks like for now I'll be mostly using my homemade PBW with hot RO water. Maybe if I add more EDTA I can use tap water.
I plan on doing this experiment again using all RO water and creating different homemade PBW mixes to find out what is the most effective and cheapest.