I am reading about cleaning my kettle, which has a buildup, using white vinegar, which seems to be unavailable in my area. Is there another product that will do?
Also, what does this say about my water? I drink it regularly (doh). Harmful, beneficial, neutral?
I’m prone to forming calcic kidney stones and aside from avoiding dairies and seafood, my doc told me to live some place where the water isn’t calcium-rich. I’m a geologist so I know where the limestone areas are. As to cleaning your kettle, women in my place use lime juice. But I’m sure dilute HCl will work. For iron pans, I reckon 1 molar acid will do. Just don’t let it stand too long (few hours) and after the scale scrubs off, fill it with water and let stand . Repeat this a few times to make sure you don’t leave acid residue.
Completely neutral. The amount of calcium (or any other mineral) you will get from drinking hard water is absolutely negligible compared to that you get from almost any food, and your body can handle quite wide range of variation in the calcium you get. The amount in the water is neither going to save your life if you are getting too little (which many people, especially women, are, of course) or make things any worse in the unlikely event that you are getting too much.
Where is this place where you cannot get white vinegar, by the way? Anyway, I don’t see why regular brown vinegar would not do the job. It might stain the actual deposits a bit, but then the plan is to remove them anyway. I don’t think it would stain or otherwise harm the kettle itself.
the_diego: Presumably you have some defect in your calcium metabolism, and, if you need to avoid consuming too much, I expect your doctor is right about about avoiding dairy, but he is full of shit telling you to avoid “calcium-rich” water. There just is not enough calcium salt dissolved in any drinking water to make a significant difference. I am suspicions of the advice about seafood, too. I am under the impression that most seafood is relatively low in calcium, at least as compared to meat from land animals. I was once told by a professor of nutrition that the Japanese diet tends to be too low in calcium (or used to be, anyway), precisely because they traditionally rely on seafood for so much of their protein intake.
Some types of seafood might have the same or lower calc as land meat. But what about those wherein you ingest the inevitable chitin and maybe some calcic hard parts (baby crabs for instance?)
So it might be some people get stones for reasons other than the water. No serious prevalence as far as I know of stones in our central islands where the surface geology is almost all-limestone, nor are stones (too) prevalent in fishing villages where the diet is high seafood and and lots of salt.
Chitin, which is indeed what crab shells are made of, does not contain calcium; it a polymer of N-acetylglucosamine: the elements in it are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. The shells of creatures such as molluscs do consist of chitin combined with calcium carbonate, but AFAIK, people do not normally eat such shells.
And yeah, I am saying everybody who get stones gets them for reasons other than the water they drink (as your examples suggest).
Putting one of those stainless steel wire thingys in the kettle helps stop the deposits from coming back. They form on the steel instead.
And, yes, brown vinegar works just as well as white. Dilute 50/50, boil up, and leave overnight. Rinse well.
Whazzat?
Another vote for brown vinegar. The color doesn’t matter, only the acetic acid content. About 1-2% of acid content is all you need, so if you vinegar is 3-5% acid content (it should say on the label), you can dilute it one part vinegar with two to four parts of water.
I don’t know if I would use HCl. If you have a stainless steel kettle, it will severely damage it. You can use Citric Acid (a common product used in canning, look in stores that sell canning supplies). Using Citric Acid avoids the vinegar smell and, being a solid instead of a liquid, I find it easier to handle. I use about a teaspoon per quart of water (a spoonful per liter). Citric acid will not harm metals or your skin (or other parts) like the strong mineral acids will.
High calcium in water (very hard water) is 350 ppm (parts per million) calcium (as calcium carbonate). That is “not very much”. With soft water, the calcium is less. The reason you get calcium deposits in your kettle is that heating the water drives off the dissolved CO2. The dissolved CO2 makes the water slightly acidic, which can dissolve more calcium (calcium carbonate). When the CO2 is removed and the lowers the acidity, the calcium comes out of solution and onto your kettle. While it may seem like a lot of buildup, consider how much water you have boiled in your kettle. One liter per day, over a year, is over 350 liters, or 350 Kg. At 350 ppm (0.035%), that is over 100 grams of Calcium Carbonate. If even only one tenth of that comes out on your kettle, well, after a few years, it can be an impressive amount. Leaving the calcium in the kettle will not harm you, but it can reduce the heating efficiency of the kettle and contribute to corrosion in the kettle, shortening it’s useful life. Periodic cleaning with dilute acid is not a bad thing.
Distilled white vinegar is usually found in the laundry detergent section of supermarkets and large drugstores, Walmart, Ace Hardware, etc. It is a very common household cleaning product. If you were looking in the salad dressing section it probably won’t be there.
I have extremely hard water and clean my tea kettle regularly with a solution of white vinegar and distilled water. Works very well.
Also, like everyone else says, there is nothing harmful in hard water. Just a royal pain for a housekeeper.
I am in Spain… and when I sent someone to get me some white vinegar, she came back with “white vinegar” , vinegar made from green grapes instead of black grapes. I have checked with google links and on several Spanish forums I see folks talking about it and always asking if anyone knows where to buy some. I’ll check around more because I would like to have some around the house. . .
That should work just fine. Here, it would be too expensive for me to choose when white *distilled *vinegar is, literally, cheaper than bottled water.
This is the stuff we’re talking about for cleaning: Robot or human?. It’s made from distilled alcohol that came from grain, not grapes, but that’s not really important. What’s important is that you have an acid, and white vinegar from grapes will do the job nicely.
CLR in my experience works near magic on calcium deposits, although not safe for all surfaces. You definitely want to check the webs for your material first.
Maybe if you had asked for distilled rather than “white” vinegar you would have got what you wanted. … Or maybe not. I don’t know what they have in Spain.
Just to add, calcium carbonate has a retrograde precipitation, meaning it precipitates at warmer temperatures. That’s why coral reefs rarely build up in deep water (> 10 meters) or at higher latitudes. The water there is colder and carbonic acid levels are higher.