Everyone saved their orange peels to make this DIY CLEANER!
Homemade Citrus All-Purpose Cleaner with citrus peels and vinegar. Save your orange peels to make a DIY cleaner.
Watch the video below and learn how to make our Homemade Citrus all-purpose cleaner. You can use this all over the house but we like to use it in the kitchen a lot. This is just a handful of natural and safe ingredients—ones that you probably already have kicking around—and it is a good-smelling cleaning machine!
Ingredients
Here are some easy to find essentials to make your own all purpose citrus cleaner:
➡️ 1 quart tightly packed citrus peels (clementine, orange, lemon, lime, grapefruit—whatever you’re eating!)
➡️ White Distilled Vinegar
➡️ Water (I used distilled)
➡️ Unscented liquid castile soap
➡️ Lemon essential oil (optional but recommended)
➡️ Spray bottle
Instructions
- Pack a quart-size glass jar tightly with leftover citrus peels, and then fill the jar to the top with vinegar. Close and set in a sunny spot to infuse for at least two weeks.
- Strain the vinegar, discard the peels, and store the vinegar in a glass jar in a dark, cool spot.
- To make an all-purpose cleaner, pour 1/2 cup of the vinegar into a spray bottle. Add in 2 cups water, 1 teaspoon castile soap, and 20 drops lemon essential oil, if using. Then screw on the lid and shake well.
- To use: shake the mixture well, and then spray onto the surface and wipe clean with a damp cloth.
We use this cleaner on our kitchen countertops (I wouldn’t recommend it on natural stone because it may damage the surface), and on our appliances. The base of this cleaner is all-natural vinegar. But to add to the disinfectant properties (and honestly, to put a damper on the vinegar smell), the vinegar is infused with citrus peels.
After a few weeks of infusing on your counter, you strain out the citrus peels and bottle up your cleaner “concentrate.” Mix the infused vinegar with water, a touch of liquid castile soap, and some (optional) lemon essential oil, and you’ve got yourself the perfect all-natural cleaner, made for just pennies.
In fact, this cleaner is made using stuff from your trash. Eat your grapefruit and mandarins and lemons, and then save the peels for this cleaner! Compared to the price of some of the all-natural cleaners on store shelves, you can’t beat the frugality of this recipe. Plus this is all-natural and you know what’s in it.
Don’t worry the vinegar scent dissipates very quickly. Spray this a few times, and you’ll immediately smell vinegar, but within a few seconds, all your nose will pick up on is a bright citrus scent.
Vinegar Facts
Acetic acid (a.k.a. white vinegar) can act as a disinfectant that can destroy some bacteria and viruses. Vinegar can inhibit the growth of and kill some food-borne pathogenic bacteria. The acid can also get off soap scum and shine surfaces.
In studies, household natural sanitizers like lemon juice and vinegar reduce the number of pathogens to undetectable levels.
Lemon is like sunshine in a bottle. And it’s a classic kitchen scent made from cold-pressing lemon peels. We use this DIY Cleaner in our kitchen all the time, and it doesn’t smell like vinegar.
You can use whatever mixture of citrus peels you want. I’m serious – just buy whatever you normally like to eat and save the peels. When it’s time for me to make more infused vinegar, I keep a wide-mouth mason jar on the counter and just fill it up with peels as we eat. And you can even add lemon essential oil.
Once it’s all full, then I pour over the vinegar and infuse. It doesn’t get any easier. I keep my cleaner in a spray bottle I got from the store. I store the leftover concentrate in a Mason jar in my cleaning closet, ready for the next time I need to refill. It really is that easy and you save a ton of money.
