Here’s why you should no longer clean your oven with baking soda and vinegar | March 22, 2025

Annonce:

With regular use, your oven can be plagued by food spills, stubborn stains, dirt, and unpleasant odors. To keep this household appliance clean, some rely on natural cleaning products to wipe, descale, scrub, disinfect, and make their oven shine. For those who prefer DIY, baking soda and white vinegar are excellent allies for cleaning the house. However, when mixed together, these natural products should be avoided if you want to clean your oven optimally. Here’s how.

Baking soda and white vinegar are considered unparalleled cleaning products. Indeed, these eco-friendly ingredients can descale, degrease, and deodorize all surfaces. But while the effectiveness of each of these products is undeniable, it seems that combining the two is ineffective in some cases. To degrease and sanitize your oven, mixing these two ingredients should be avoided.

Is the baking soda and white vinegar combination ineffective?

True stars of eco-friendly cleaning, baking soda and white vinegar are economical, practical, and effective. These products are formidable for cleaning the bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, or even the garden. However, combining the two can be useless, says Raphaël Haumont , a researcher specializing in molecular gastronomy.

According to the specialist, the ingredients have antagonistic properties and cancel each other out when used together. And for good reason: vinegar is acidic (its pH is 4) while sodium bicarbonate is basic (its pH is 8). Thus, by mixing the two products, we obtain a natural product with a neutral pH (pH of 6.6). As the researcher explains, the closer the pH is to 7, the closer we get to soft water, and the mixture becomes less effective. Thus, the scientist advises avoiding the use of this mixture to unclog pipes. It would be completely useless, he indicates. It would be much wiser to use a corrosive product like concentrated soda or highly concentrated pure acid, he specifies. Thus, mixing the two products in a bottle and keeping them for later use would be useless. The result would be water that would be completely ineffective for effectively cleaning surfaces.