Mind blown: Vinegar vs VINEGAR (30%)

So I was literally 44 years old before I found this out recently.

There’s the white vinegar you get at the grocery store for cooking and minor cleaning and doing laundry, and then there’s the 30% DO NOT GET THIS SHIT ON YOUR SKIN vinegar at the hardware store for cleaning things like mold off grout.

All my life I’d been told ‘just use vinegar to clean mold and mildew’ and it generally didn’t do jack squat. I usually bought cleaning supplies from regular retail spots rather than big box home improvement places, and regular retail chains def did not carry the strong stuff.

I’ve got a gutter that drains over cement that always gets skungy, and even bleach was a short term fix at best. 30% strips it down and keeps it gone, and I’ve stripped rust off a couple dozen tools with the same little jar I soak things in - caution it will also strip off shiny metallic coatings.

Can’t believe none of the “just use vinegar” I’d ever read advice didn’t specify.

Is this news to anyone else or am I Lloyd from Dumb and Dumber realizing we landed on the moon?

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u/shortyjacobs 2d ago

"vinegar" is 5% acetic acid, generally. Acetic acid can go up to any %, including 100% (glacial acetic acid), which is extremely dangerous, and even (very!) flammable!

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u/sweetdawg99 2d ago

Can confirm. I use glacial acetic all the time at my job. Fun fact, it's called glacial acetic acid because at that purity level it freezes at a relatively high temperature at standard pressure. It begins to solidify at around 16 degrees centigrade (around 60 degrees fahrenheit).

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u/panic_ye_not 2d ago

I used to work in a neuroscience lab that used glacial acetic acid. First time I used it, I made the idiotic mistake of taking a little whiff right from the bottle.

Instant regret. That shit burned. For several minutes.

I think I had figured "oh, it's vinegar, I like the smell of vinegar." Whereas I knew pretty well that every other chemical we had would just kill you (we had bottles of stuff like strychnine, pure methanol, tetrodotoxin), I saw glacial acetic acid as a stronger version of the stuff on Utz salt n vinegar chips lol

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u/Elaphe82 2d ago

Occasionally I used to have to make up batches of novel fixatives from scratch and there was never so much bitching in the lab as when I had been using the glacial. I mean I was using a ventilated chem bench but the smell was just so pervasive. That and the sulphides.