Soap scum covered shower glass transforms when you ditch common product
By Rachael Gavin|
A shower with crystal clear glass is a thing of beauty and one of life's simple pleasures.
But getting it sparkling again once soap scum gets on it can be hugely frustrating.
However, a professional cleaner tells nine.com.au that ditching one common product will go a long way towards making your shower glass less cloudy.
Sara Allan, owner of Housekeeping Heroes NSW, says her biggest tip for combating soap scum is to stop using bars soap.
"Bars of soap contain so much heavy minerals and calcium in them. So when you're showering and you're using the bar of soap to wash your whole body, it's flicking off onto the shower screen, onto the walls, onto the floors," she says.
"Because it tends to be quite thick, even when it's liquefied, with the heat and steam of a shower that's what causes it to gel to the shower screen or the floor."
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Her other tip for combating soap scum is to squeegee the shower after every use, or the last shower of the morning or night.
While Allan admits that, like most of us, she doesn't keep up with this habit regularly, it does make a big difference to your shower glass by removing soap and shampoo residue from the screen before it has time to stick to the surface.
"I always say to customers you either want to do the couple of seconds on each surface after the last shower of the day, or you're going to spend 30 minutes to an hour scrubbing the shower once you feel like the buildup is getting quite heavy. Then in that case a lot of the time you have to use more toxic chemicals with high acidity," she explains.
Allan's favourite product for dealing with soap scum buildup on showers is One Shot Thick, but if you don't want to use any chemicals at all she "hands down recommends" 0000 super fine steel wool, which is typically in the paint section of hardware stores.
"You wet it, and then you go over the glass or the tiles or the frames, and that lifts all that calcium and soap scum as well," she says.
"That never fails. I myself, in nine years, I've had a 100 per cent success rating with superfine steel wool."
You might be thinking steel wool sounds a bit rough for shower glass but the type Allan uses is very fine because of the grade, which you'll find on the packaging.
"it's not gonna scratch that glass in any way, shape, or form, either and because it's so light, it's just gentle motions. You're not having to really get in there and scrub it," she says.
"It just cuts away everything just with ease and it's brilliant. I can't recommended it enough."?
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Whether you squeegee the shower daily or not, cleaning your shower every week or two also helps to reduce the amount of soap scum buildup.
"Just give it a good wipe down or scrub down with a dishwashing liquid and a magic eraser and that's all you need to do," Allan said.
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