I love this thread! Anytime I can find a good homemade recipe for household products I'm in heaven!

I used to have the url to a website that listed all kinds of homemade 'recipes'... I'll try to find it and post it here. : )

here ya go...scroll down just a bit to see the listings.

Here is a link that might be useful: household recipes

Somehow, I can't see many of them as being any more "frugal" than buying a commercial product (as concentrate or on sale, of course). With cinnamon sticks at $6+ a bottle, that's a heck of a lot of long-lasting room deodorizers.

Ahnd some of the recipes, such as the "silver cleaner" are damaging to the item you are cleaning. That method ruins the finish of silver, and can leave it covered with tiny pits.

I agree......most are no cheaper than buying the commercial product.....and who wants air freshener to smell like spiced vinegar?
Some are pretting good...like the silver polish of whiting and olive oil....but where are you going to get whiting?...I'll just buy Wrights polish thanks...it already has the whiting in it.
Linda C

This may be old news, BUT...
I hated cleaning my silver. We use silver-plated flatware for everyday use and it goes right into the DW. I do try to seperate the SP from the stainless, but it still tends to tarnish. After spending my last afternoon at the kitchen sink with Wright's silver cream I came upon this recipe:

Fill container with very hot water, add a piece of aluminum foil and a dash or two of salt. Place the tarnished items into the water and watch the tarnish move from the silver to the aluminum. It took about five minutes for the really tarnished pieces and I did rub some with a baking soda paste, too, but my silver is all shiny with minimal elbow grease.
This is supposed to be better for the silver than polishing because the tarnish chemically reacts with the aluminum and bonds to it rather than the silver. Polishing actually removes a small amount of silver with the tarnish.

Do NOT use the aluminum foil and salt method on silver you care about!

It chemically EATS off the top layer of silver, causing microscopic pitting. Whenm you comparer silver that has been polished versus silver that has been dunked, you see a loss of surface texture.

LAZYGARDENS-
I looked up some pretty technical references about this silver polishing method. It did seem safer for the silver. Tarnish is actually a silver-sulfur complex. In a salt solution the sulfur bonds preferentially to aluminum rather than the silver leaving the silver in place on the silverware.
Polishing removes the silver-sulfur complex so every time the item is polished it loses a little silver.
If you have had experience with this method harming your silver I will certainly rethink doing it again!
Thanks,
Megan

"Objects cleaned by this method may tarnish more quickly than silver that has been polished, for the object's surface will act like a sponge and more readily absorb tarnish-producing gases and moisture."

It leaves the surface looking "raw" - too bright and slightly matte.

Here is a link that might be useful: Silversmithing site

busybody-

I squeegee my shower after I use it, but I have city water- I grew up with really hard water, and we used to spritz the shower down with vinegar every few days to try and keep ahead of the calcium deposits, though...of course, it still needed scrubbing.

as to the floor mate... why not just copy down the main ingredients, and see what's closest? I'm sure it's no great leap of technology...

but I got to ask- does it actually save you any time, after you get done cleaning the unit?

Probably doesn't save time. However, it definitely makes the floors cleaner since there is no used mop water streaking across the floor.