Today The New York Times tackles the questions of how to dispense with ghosts and toxic household chemicals.
Joyce Walder writes an entertaining and surprisingly informative article about how to spiritually spiff up your home in the event that it is shared with an unwanted presence. (Don’t get excited however, she does not deal with the [...]
Consumer Reports rates Clorox Green Works Natural Bathroom Cleaner online before a more comprehensive report on Shower Cleaners is released in the September 2008 issue.
Designed for counters, shower doors, sinks, tubs, tile and other bathroom surfaces, the product manufacturer claims it to be 99.05% natural and made only with plant and mineral-based ingredients. [...]
Hoover turned 100 and to celebrate issued a line of special anniversary models called (drumroll, please) The Anniversary Edition.
The Convertible (pictured) features WindTunnel Technology and gives the user a green light when an area is clean (releasing one from the nagging question of how many passes are necessary to adequately clean a carpet).
Read more here [...]
Clean+istry frequently fields the question “what are HEPA filters and why should I care?”. When Clean+istry was just a pup, starting out in the world, we would sometimes end up in a cloud of dust while vacuuming. We were then forced to continue vacuuming the dust that we had recirculated. The circle of dust created was wicked [...]
A common question we frequently field is “what are HEPA filters and why should I care?”. When Clean+istry was just a pup, starting out in the world and vacuuming our apartment with the only vacuum cleaner that our modest financial means at the time would allow, we would notice a cloud of dust forming [...]
No matter how many times Clean+istry screens “An Inconvenient Truth,” we find it hard to define a VOC.
That’s because the term VOC (short for volatile organic compounds) represents such a wide range of carbon-based chemicals (several thousand, probably more) that form vapor at normal room temperatures. (by the way, normally you can’t see a VOC, [...]
Clean+istry is human, sort of, and guilty of using shorthand in referencing the composition of household cleaners.
For instance, we frequently point you in the direction of a “pH neutral” dishwashing detergent. This perfectly illustrates the type of maddening instruction that led to the birth of Clean+istry in the first place.
A simple understanding of the [...]
Depending on your data source, 80-85% of Americans use “hard” water.
WHAT IS IT? Hard water carries high levels of calcium (good for bones, less so for glass shower walls), magnesium and iron.
WHY CARE Minerals turn to scale, which in turn clogs pipes, shortens the life span of the Bosch, and reduces the cleaning punch of [...]
Last week we reported that soapbark was a central ingredient in Williams-Somoma’s Pure & Green line of cleaning products. We, however, were stumped by soap bark.
The soapbark tree (Quillaja saponaria), is an evergreen native to central Chile and Peru. The inner bark of the tree can be reduced to powder and used as [...]
Soaps and detergents are both surfactants. Surfactants give soaps and detergents their cleaning power.
Soap is a word, widely used, and frequently misapplied. While it is generally acknowledged that laundry products are almost always detergents, liquid dishwasher soaps found on countertops are frequently not soaps, but rather detergents as well.
Why? Because the ingredients [...]