There are many homemade cleaning products for nearly everything, even for your wooden floor. A natural hardwood floor cleaner can be a good solution if you want to avoid bringing toxic chemicals in your house. You can clean your wooden floor with homemade products or natural commercial products. Here are some popular options you can use to naturally clean your hardwood floor and why it’s best to go with the most ecological one.
RECIPES FOR A NATURAL HARDWOOD CLEANER
A wooden floor is easy to maintain. A light damp mopping with a little bit of water of warm water is usually enough on a daily basis. But, if your wooden floor is dirty, they are some tricky homemade recipes you might be tempted to use went searching eco-friendly solution.
VINEGAR AND WATER
A formula recommended by do-it-yourself experts (and possibly, your grandparents), applying a 50/50 solution of these two cleaning agents can remove the toughest of dirt buildup within your hardwood floors. However, as inexpensive and easy as they are to apply, they both can damage your floor in an instant if you use it too often.
Too much water can cause your floor to swell and warp which causes a rippling effect in the wood, reducing its sturdiness while making your floor look dingy. Furthermore, given the acidic nature of vinegar, using it can damage your floor’s finish. Even though vinegar, particularly distilled white vinegar, is a great degreaser and cuts through mildew like a knife, it can be counterproductive. Both can cause your floors to look duller.
Some have suggested that you can add alcohol and drops of dish soap should you want a nicer smell and add more strength to this formula. Given how strong alcohol fumes are and how flammable it is, it might not be the wisest thing to use though. Another alternative would be to use essential oils for a nice smell, covering up the strong scents of vinegar and alcohol. But, this variation of the recipe can still damage your wooden floor’s finish no matter how much you try to mask it. Keep that in mind during your search for the ideal natural wood floor cleaner.
VINEGAR AND VEGETABLE OIL
To avoid putting water on your wooden floor, replace it with vegetable oil can be a less damageable idea. Vegetable oil will act as a better protection agent for your wood’s finish and won’t do as much damage as water mixed with vinegar would.
It is best advised to combine equal amounts of vegetable oil and white vinegar in a spray bottle and mix it fresh each time. This way, they don’t separate, and it prevents the oil from going bad. You can apply this mix using a soft-cloth mop once a week, with the vinegar removing the dirt and the vegetable oil conditioning the wood, keeping it shiny. However, acid within the vinegar can damage the floor if wrongly applied, so be careful with this homemade cleaning solution.
ECOLOGICAL COMMERCIAL PRODUCTS FOR HARDWOOD FLOORS
Though they look nice, most homemade cleaning products or recipes for hardwood floors contain one common ingredient, vinegar. It might be cheap and tough on dirt, but it’s even tougher on your floor’s finish and overall condition. Plus, it has an unpleasant smell that you won’t want to be around for too long.
To get rough with buildup but gentle with your floor’s finish, it is best recommended that you use commercial pH-neutral soap products using natural based surfactant components. Natural surfactants are compounds that reduce surface tension between any two liquids, acting as wetting agents and detergents, among other things. Choose a natural hardwood floor cleaner containing gentle blends of pH-neutral ingredients, restoring shine to your floor without leaving streaks on it or damaging its finish. Furthermore, they don’t contain toxins, no phosphates and are biodegradable, not only keeping your floors in good condition but keeping you safe from bacteria. The best natural hardwood floor cleaner you can buy has those characteristics.
You can find several ecologically-friendly products to clean and protect your wooden floor on the market. There are some cleaning products made from plants and natural materials. They are also inexpensive because they are concentrated and to be diluted in water. For example, 10 mL (one tablespoon) of solution is suited for 10 L of water, so a 250 mL bottle of cleaner will produce 250 L of cleaning water!
Homemade products can help to clean your floor in an environmentally friendly way, but there are better options. Reducing the lifetime of your floor might not be that eco-friendly after all. You will probably have better results with natural commercial products. If you feel you’ve got some questions to be answer or if you want to learn more about how to protect a wooden floor, register for a training course with LIVOS.
