greetings; Sorry for the delay...I have been reviewing several of the (rather dated)investigations I have on conifer seed treatment using bleach as well as supplemental articles available on the internet. My conclusion in this case is that sometimes brevity without further elucidation can be misleading... I also visited some local growers to survey the retail price of cellpack inserts:($1.00 per sheet)and 2.5 inch pots:(05 cents each or 12 for the price of 10).I have found that in many instances the 32cells/sheet separated to 4 cells/with a saucer and draped with plastic wrap is a satisfactory modular set-up for indoor sowing whereby seeds are thinly sowed based upon the genetics and physiology of the cultivar.>Then pricked out to a more suitable cellpack or pot...This set-up also might help reduce cross-contamination of diseased seeds obtained through seed-exchanges.Also I would recommend the booklet on propagation published by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden...(regarding:seeds of dubious hybrid derivatives yielding weak seedlings and so forth... The 2.5 inch pot is one of the industry standards suitable for many outplanting garden situations. By surveying a local garden shop one can determine if more than one seedling/pot is feasible and note the poracity of the media that is used.A 2.5inch pot economizes media ,space, and overall expenditure...(32pots/1020 flat)which can then be halved/ spaced to 18 or less as the crop develops...If a larger size pot is required- that is rather understood... Much of the satifactory results with a 2.5inch pot are based upon timing;knowing the environment you are working with(light quality/duration)temp.growing lean(fertilizer/irrigation); proper fertilizer selection;air circulation and so forth found in any good book on seed propagation... the phytotoxicity of bleach when working with seedlings is from my own experience conferring with a senior grower long ago and reconfirmed by further reading.The information and citations at hand is modified from the original investigations > Nelson,P.V.(1978).Greenhouse Operation and Management;Moody,E.H. and G.E.Smith (1982)Sanitation:Plant Health from Start to Finish.Publ.286.Raleigh,N.C.North Carolina Extension Service:84-100

In the old days --- uh-oh, there's the chronic old fart warning klaxon -- we used to heat the oven to warm (about 200F), shut it off, put in a bowl with a cup of ammonia, and leave it sit over-night. Then, toss the ammonia down the sink, and scrub the walls etc. with a scrubby and dish detergent. There were commercial (i.e., restaurant and institutional grade) oven cleaners but they were incredibly caustic and a big problem for anything that was not stainless steel. (Old fashioned Lutefisk might have smelled worse, but it was a pretty close call!) The instructions for my NXR say not to use "commerciaL" oven cleaners and I'm pretty sure (and have been told) that this means the actual "commercial" products not the residential grade stuff like Fume-free Easy Off, I've used the latter several times with no apparent ill effects (basically after the massive cooking marathons of Thanksgiving and Christmas). "No ill effects" means that I have not stripped the shine off the oven lining. As I understand it it, the warnings about not using "commercial" oven cleaners refer to the restaurant/insitutional grade products, not the "residential" products like Easy Off. (Do be aware, however, that some Easy-Off products are pretty d@*& strong. So, during your stove's warranty period, you want to use the "gentler" stuff like Fume Free rather than the Extra-Strength. What I do most of the time is a modified version of what Whirlpool calls "Acqua-lift."Basically, I get the oven very hot and let a bunch of water vapor in. (Typically, by putting a CI pan of water in the bottom of the oven when I'm baking bread.) Once the oven walls have cooled past the too-hot-to-touch stage, I scrub the walls using Dawn and blue scrubbie. That usually takes care of the problem. When it does not, I use the Fume Free Easy-Off. This post was edited by JWVideo on Fri, Apr 25, 14 at 23:48

I absolutely love this thread. When we bought our house in 1981, the previous owner left it a mess. Oh, she did scrub out the tub. But not the floors or range or anything else for that matter. The bathroom walls had disgusting tobacco stains-her husband was a smoker and died of lung cancer. Hubs and I took a full week off from work to clean it. I remember spending most of one day scrubbing the range hood fan-disgusting grease from previous (original) owner. And she haggled with us over the last hundred dollars of the sale price. She "left" us her washing machine and dryer and wanted an extra hundred before we moved in. We told her at the closing meeting, take them out or we will charge YOU a fee of one hundred dollars to haul them away. Turned out she left them and we didn't give her the extra money and they both worked for about five years. The dryer was a "Speed Queen" commercial dryer and actually worked very well. And the back yard was a mess too. We spent most of the summer trimming back her grossly overgrown bushes. Took 30 bundles of sticks and branches out. And it turned out the previous owner moved to Arizona, hated the heat and was back a year later. She moved in with her sister and we "heard" thru connections that she was sorry she sold the house to us. But we spent most of that first year making the house habitable. And clean. Really clean.

I have a good understanding of chemistry, and synethetic molecules are a popular case study as they represent many important features of molecules in a controlled simplified environment. Anyway, I've discovered a lot of things about cleaning products through this, and one is that expensive brands are often very much the same as cheap ones. The vast range of products are composed of a fairly small number of chemicals and they mostly come from the same large producers. The disinfectant substance in a large number of products will have come from the same factory, as will the colour, detergent and other ingredients. The greatest difference between products is concentration, colourant and scent - the last two of which have very little to do with how well it cleans. I've also found that more expensive products have a larger number of ingredients, but they're not often useful. Thickeners convince people they're getting a stronger product, which is an illusion, just as optical brighteners (small reflecive particles) make things look whiter than they are, and greater quantities of foaming agent make lots of bubbles that look great in the bucket and don't actually do anything else. I am increasingly convinced that buying expensive products is often pointless. Much of what you pay goes in to expensive packing, advertising and ingredients that give the impression they're working better. The basic ingredients that do the real cleaning are actually of minimal value and are much the same whatever product you're using. Also, as a customer in my own house without any scientific tests I have found some very cheap products work better than brand names. The problem is that they don't know the specific dirt you're going to be cleaning with them, they can only guess and include the ingredients they presume will work well. In some cases an expensive brand with many ingredients will not work as well as a cheap product with few ingredients that just happens to include one which suits your dirt better.