7 Surprising Ways to Clean With Vinegar (That Actually Work)

Between work, family, and trying to enjoy everything Chicago has to offer, keeping your space clean can feel like a constant battle. If you’re tired of spending your free time scrubbing, these vinegar cleaning hacks will help you maintain a fresh home—or you can always book our fast cleaning services to handle the tough jobs for you.

Why Vinegar Works So Well for Cleaning

Before we dive into the specific uses, let’s talk about why vinegar is such a cleaning powerhouse. Different cleaning products have different strengths—baking soda is great for scrubbing and deodorizing, while dish soap lifts dirt from surfaces. Vinegar’s magic comes from its acidity, which breaks down grease, eliminates odors, and leaves surfaces streak-free. Best of all, it’s affordable and easy to find!

7 Unexpected Vinegar Cleaning Hacks

1. The Ultimate DIY All-Purpose Cleaner

Combine vinegar and dish soap for a powerful cleaner that tackles greasy, grimy surfaces. The basic recipe is two parts vinegar to one part dish soap, but you can adjust based on your needs. For heavily soiled areas, use more dish soap; for windows and mirrors where you want a streak-free shine, amp up the vinegar. This versatile cleaner works throughout your home and can save you money on commercial products—though for truly stubborn messes, our professional home cleaning team is just a click away.

2. Natural Weed Killer

Tired of weeds taking over your garden or patio? Fill a spray bottle with straight vinegar and spray directly onto weeds, targeting the roots. Be careful to avoid surrounding plants you want to keep, as vinegar doesn’t discriminate between weeds and your prized flowers. For larger areas, you can even pour vinegar directly between pavers or interlocking stones.

3. Refresh Your Bathroom Tools

Your toilet brush and plunger deserve some TLC too! Soak them in straight vinegar for 30 minutes or overnight to break down buildup and eliminate odors. No scrubbing required—just rinse thoroughly and let dry. If you’d rather not think about cleaning these items at all, our cleaning service near me will handle all the unpleasant tasks for you.

4. Clean Windshield Wiper Blades

Dirty wiper blades can seriously impair your vision during Chicago’s rainy seasons. Dip a cloth in vinegar and gently wipe the blades up and down to remove dirt, dead bugs, and buildup. Finish with a clean cloth for a final wipe-down, and you’ll have streak-free visibility in no time.

5. Deodorize Compost Bins

Compost bins can develop that unpleasant “garbage juice” smell from accumulated moisture. After emptying your compost bag, pour vinegar into the bottom of the bin and let it sit overnight. The vinegar breaks down odors and buildup—just dump, rinse, and dry in the morning. If other areas of your home need odor elimination, our deep cleaning help can tackle even the toughest smells.

6. Clean Dental Appliances

Invisalign trays, retainers, and mouthguards can harbor bacteria and develop unpleasant odors. Soak them in equal parts water and vinegar for a few hours between uses to break down bacteria and film. Remember to rinse thoroughly before wearing—you won’t taste any vinegar residue. While you’re taking care of your dental health, let us take care of your home with our comprehensive apartment cleaning services.

7. Remove Hard Water Buildup from Shower Heads

If your shower head is spraying in different directions, hard water buildup is likely the culprit. Fill a plastic bag with vinegar, secure it around the shower head with a rubber band, and leave it overnight. The vinegar will dissolve the mineral deposits. In the morning, remove the bag and run water through the shower head. For stubborn spots, gently scrub with a toothbrush. This Chicago cleaning company knows that hard water is a common issue in our area, which is why we include detailed fixture cleaning in all our services.

When to Call in the Professionals

While vinegar is fantastic for many cleaning tasks, sometimes you need more heavy-duty help. Whether you’re preparing for guests, moving in or out, or just want to maintain a consistently clean home, it might be time to schedule a cleaning with experts who know Chicago homes inside and out.

As one of the top-rated cleaning services in Chicago, we understand that life gets busy. Sometimes the best cleaning hack is knowing when to ask for someone to clean my apartment so you can focus on what matters most to you.

You’ve probably spent enough time on the internet at this point to know that you can clean many things with vinegar. Yes, it is not just for salad dressing and fish and chips, my friends. It is for cleaning. And in this video, I want to share with you seven unexpected ways that you can clean with vinegar. And when I talk about vinegar, unless I say so otherwise, I am talking about white vinegar that is 5% acidic acid. Give this video a thumbs up if you love saving money and making your own cleaning products. And just a quick reminder, if you haven’t done so already to subscribe to the Clean MySpace channel. And I wanted to let you know that this video is brought to you by Makers Clean, our sister company, where we sell premium microfiber cleaning tools and more. Before we get into the different ways that you can use vinegar, I want to explain to you briefly about what vinegar does and why it is so special. When we think about cleaning agents or cleaning products, there are different magic things that each one can offer to you. For example, baking soda is an abrasive. It’s also a deodorizer and a brightener. Dish soap is a detergent. It’s a surfactant. So, it is designed to lift dirt up to a surface. Vinegar is an acid. So vinegar has its own special magic similar to lemon juice. It’s just a lot cheaper and easier to get your hands on. But the idea is that it can break down grease and odors and it helps to leave surfaces nice and streak free. So now that you know that magic power about vinegar, let’s talk about how you can use it. If you’ve been on the internet in the last 10 years, you know that vinegar and dish soap combined together to make a very powerful cleaner. The recipe that we generally like to use is two parts vinegar to one part dish soap. That makes a pretty thick cleaner that can get rid of a lot of greasy, grimy buildup. Now, here’s the thing. There’s no magic recipe when it comes to this combination. It’s more a matter of understanding the cleaning challenge that you have ahead of you and what you’re actually trying to accomplish. If it’s a really greasy, grimy, silty, sudy surface that you have to clean and you need a DIY recipe for that, I would amp up the dish soap. I put more in there because that’s exactly what dish soap does. It’s a surfactant. It brings dirt up to the surface, making it easier to clean away. Vinegar is more of that acid, so it breaks things down. It helps to leave surfaces clean, grease free, and streak free. So, you might want to amp up the vinegar if, say, you’re cleaning a dirty window outside. You don’t want as much dish soap in there because you don’t have as much greasy, grimy stuff to clean. Um, and you sort of want more of that streak free shine. You will still have to do a little bit of clean up afterward because there will be some residue from the dish soap, but it won’t be nearly as much as if you were cleaning that more heavyduty cleaning task. So, I hope that makes sense. The bottom line is this is a winning recipe. You can use it in most places around your home so long as it is safe to use vinegar on that surface. And the idea here is just to play around with that ratio and see what works for the cleaning task at hand. If you think you’ve overdosed or underdosed on something, you can always change it up by diluting it with water as well. So, there’s another quick tip. Several years ago, they banned the use of certain weed killers here in Canada, which left a lot of Canadians with a lot of dandelions. and we were curious about what to do. So, it came out that vinegar was actually very effective at getting rid of weeds. So, if you have regular 5% vinegar, that’s great. If you can get your hands on the more powerful stuff, 6%, 10%, that is also very effective. The way that you do it, fill a spray bottle with straight vinegar, go right up to the weed, give it a few sprays, and you want to spray kind of right at the root cuz who cares about the top? You want to get right right down to business. But you want to make sure that you’re not spraying any grass or any other beautiful plants or flowers that you have growing adjacent to those weeds because the vinegar will also kill those, which you don’t want to do. If you have interlocking, we’ve got really aggressive a couple years ago cuz the weeds got really aggressive in our interlocking and we just kind of poured vinegar right there into the interlocking. So there you go. If you’re somebody who has some stuff growing in your garden that you’d rather not see, give vinegar a try. Some of the least respected cleaning tools in your home live in your bathroom. Your toilet bowl brush and the plunger. That tool that no one wants to look at or think about until they need it. Now, these things often times don’t get cleaned because let’s be honest, when are you ever going to feel motivated to pick one of those up and clean them? But if you just pour straight vinegar into a bucket and soak them 30 minutes overnight, you can’t hurt them. You’re going to be doing them a big favor. What that does is it helps to break down some of the buildup that’s been there. You know, anything that’s old and hanging around, creating odors or looking unsightly. Then you can obviously dump the bin somewhere um where you’re not going to be eating uh from and give it a good rinse. Let those tools dry and then replace them. you won’t even have to do any scrubbing. And the nice thing is the vinegar will break down a lot of that buildup for you, leaving those items just a little more clean and palatable. If you’re someone who gets around by car, I’m sure you’ve experienced the frustration of a dirty windshield wiper. Now, this might not seem like a big deal. It’s like stubbing your baby toe. You don’t really notice your baby toe until you stub it, and then it hurts like crazy, and you’re like, “Oh my god, I have to give more love to my baby toe, cuz that really hurts right now.” It’s the same thing with your wiper blades. When they’re not dirty, you don’t really think about them. But the second they get dirty, they mess up your whole game. It’s very hard to drive. They leave uneven streaks on your windows or dirty spots and kind of spread everything around on that windshield and they make your life difficult. The easiest way to clean your wiper blades is to take a cloth, dip it in some vinegar, pull the blade back, and just wipe kind of like you’re playing a violin very gently. But you want to wipe that cloth up and down several times to remove any of that dirt or buildup, dead bugs, whatever you got stuck on that windshield wiper blade. You want to get that off just using straight vinegar. And once that is done, you can then flip to a clean corner of a cloth. Wipe up just to, you know, do that one final wipe down to make sure it’s nice and clean and perfect. And voila, you’re in great shape. You can get back on the road with confidence and your windshield will look great. Anyone who composts using one of those compost bags and a little organic spin knows that those bags sweat. Yes, they do. And that is kind of gross. And the bigger issue is that that sweat then drips and pools into the bottom of your compost bin and starts to smell. It’s effectively garbage juice and it is sitting there and stinking. So, the easiest way to fix that after you’ve removed your compost bag is to pour some vinegar into the bottom and leave it overnight. No touching, no spinning around with a cloth. Don’t worry about it. Just let the vinegar do the work. It’s going to break down some of that yucky buildup, some of the odors, and then in the morning, dump it out, give it a rinse, dry it, replace the bag. No more sweaty smells. Extremely unimportant fact, I wore Invisalign trays. I had the pleasure of getting braces twice. First time when I was 13, and I re-uped a few years back. Those trays get really yucky, and I was obsessive about brushing mine. I brush them at least twice a day, but they do live in your mouth full time and they’re harboring all kinds of bacteria. Now, aside from Invisalign trays, if you’re someone that wears a retainer or even a mouthguard for sleeping or sports, you might want to consider soaking these in a cup filled with water and vinegar. You can use an equal part solution. The vinegar just helps to break down any of that odor-causing bacteria and some of the film that might build up. So, this won’t replace brushing. You still must brush, but you can leave these in and soak them when you’re not wearing them or for a couple of hours between wees to help break down odors. Obviously, give them a really good rinse, and you won’t taste or smell vinegar once that’s done. If you’ve ever been in the shower, looked up and noticed that the water is not coming out straight down or straight out, but it’s kind of shooting in different directions, that’s a really good indication that your shower head has hard water buildup. This is nothing to feel bad about. It’s perfectly normal and natural, but it is annoying and it means that your shower head is not going to work as efficiently as you would like it to. Very easy fix for this is to fill a plastic bag with plain white vinegar. Make sure there are no holes in it. That would be a real bummer. and then affix it to the shower head with an elastic band. Leave it overnight. The vinegar will help to break down all of those little pieces of hard water buildup that have been stuck in the shower head over time. Then the next morning, just remove the vinegar, dump it down the drain, run the shower head, and you’ll see immediately you’ll notice a difference. Now, if you’re still having some issues, you can take uh either a little cleaning toothbrush or a cloth and just gently give a scrub, and that will help to lift off any of the residual hard water buildup. This also will work really well on a faucet head if needed. Okay, so now you know seven ways you can clean with vinegar, but that’s just scratching the surface of this amazing and pungent liquid. And that brings me to this week’s comment question, which is, are you disgusted by the smell of vinegar? Are you neutral or are you totally fine with it slash it kind of makes you happy, brings up good memories? Let me know in the comments down below. The smell of vinegar is extremely polarizing. I’ve been making these videos since 2012, and I have heard the entire spectrum of opinions on the scent of vinegar. So, I would love to know yours. If you love what we do here at Clean My Space, consider supporting my team and I and becoming a member. If you love making DIY cleaning products, you will find this video absolutely fascinating. It is some unbelievable borax cleaning hacks that you should totally try. So, you can check that out over here. If you haven’t done so already, make sure that you subscribe to the Clean MySpace channel. Thanks so much for watching and we’ll see you next time.