Well not exactly a fail I guess. It did do exactly what it was supposed to do. The pin in question is this lovely idea to boil up your greasy hood vent fans and remove all the yuck.
It is also quite likely that I went at this thing all wrong and the resulting mess was really my fault. I am not a clean and tidy person by nature, I'm a messy all over the place person and it's hard for me to instinctively go where a less mess version of whatever I'm doing might lie.
I think this idea goes back to the Manly Housekeeper although I'm sure he got it somewhere and then Jillee at One Good Thing posted about it and it got pinned and voila. Here I am.
So most people have a small, almost square, rectangular vent filter. I just happen to have two, extremely long, skinny rectangular filters so right off the hop I'm not going to get this done exactly right.
The idea is that you put on a pot of water, set to boil and add baking soda. Then you put your filter in the boiling water and it will effortlessly clean your filter for you.
Here is what my before/after picture looks like.
Here is a shot of one of the filters that I tried to clean next to the dirty one that had not been cleaned at all. The shiny silver part is cleaned (and really clean!) where the dingy brown parts are not cleaned. The stripe down the middle is there because I could not fit the whole thing in the pot. The second picture is of filter number 2 after also getting the treatment.
This last picture is a closer shot of the clean vs the dirty. It's a huge difference and the filter is almost as good as new. I could not help but wonder how much a new filter would have cost me, mostly because the effect of getting this sparkly "like-new" clean was that it looked like something from a TV crime lab was going down in my kitchen. It also smelled pretty gross. It made me a bit uncomfortable.
Here are some pictures of the process. I had seen a post about preventing boil overs by putting a chop stick across the top of the pot so I tried using a skewer to do the same thing. No luck. Boiled over a few times. So gross.
So here you can see some pictures of the mess that was involved. The baking soda splatters came out of the pot and hit everywhere. Super easy to clean up but really disturbing to see. Especially when you look at what wicked little bits are floating around the pot. I'm so grossed out by this point that I'm trying to create a sneeze guard for the pot with a lid. There was a lot of this green/brown slime and only about 1/2 of the filter got cleaned.
It took me a little bit to clean up after all this smelly good times were wrapped up. Not as much as you might think because the baking soda cleaned up pretty easily and it helped clean the rest too.
So after all that, the environmentalist in me is feeling pretty righteous about keeping these two small pieces of metal out of the landfill. There is another part of me that wonders how much money I actually saved. Maybe 40$?
I ran them both under some hot water for about 10 minutes to try and clean up the middle part. I poured baking soda on them and let them soak. I rinsed again. Not even nearly as good as you can see by the last picture. There is still a clear line where the treatment ended and where my 1/2 ass attempts to clean are not quite making it.
Again not so glamourous. Not so easy peasy as the glossy pictures made it seem. I'm wondering now about the fantasy land that is my pinterest journal. I dream when I pin things. My hopes soar, inspirations lift. I'm starting to wonder if I'm based in reality at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment