Among a list of the many “home made” house cleaning formulas are some that include dilute mixtures of ammonia and vinegar.
Is this just folk lore or is there some chemistry supporting such a mixture?
citations? examples?
Wag:
They’re both useful solvents, and dissolve different things. However, ammonia and acetic acid react with each other to form ammonium acetate which isn’t particularly useful as a cleaner. If much of this reaction takes places you are losing the efficacy of both solvents, so it doesn’t seem like a particularly good idea. At household concentrations and approximate proportions, though, you may have leftover amounts of one or both solvents.
to clarify - you may have leftover amount of one or the other solvent…if you still have both, they’ll react with each other…
That is exactly what I thought.
At weak household concentrations, and with all the other impurities in there, I’m not certain of that. Household ammonia is 5-10% ammonia by weight. Vinegar is probably about 5-8% acetic acid. Ammonia deprotonates in water to yield ammonium hydroxide. I’m not sure the ammonia / acetic acid reaction is going to proceed to completion in that environment.
So we might end up with a weak(?) buffer of some sort?
vinegar and ammonia can both be useful separately in solution to clean things.
when you buy things like vinegar (5%) , ammonia (5 to 10%) and bleach (3 - 6%) they are in water solution. when you use them you dilute them again with more water so that any of then are a fraction of a percent. they can actually be stronger cleaners when dilute than concentrated due to the ions they produce.
many people operate on ‘more of a good thing’ method. taking something that is good and mixing with something other that is good thinking they are getting something better. there is also the thought that if a lower concentration of something is good than a higher concentration is better.
vinegar cleans somethings by being an acidic solution. ammonia cleans something by being a basic (alkaline) solution. if you mix them together they will neutralize each other forming a salt solution and not be a useful cleaning solution.
bleach mixed with other chemicals can produce things that are irritants or toxic, don’t do it.
when very dilute these substances form the strongest solutions because that is when they produce the most ions which do the cleaning.