Dear mid-60s Buick caregivers who like to
“clean house,”When I was a kid, cleaning stuff was easy - I just used the products mom and dad used. As I grew up, I continued to use the same products, but would occasionally get dissatisfied with them and try something else - but which other product to try?
For decades we have used
Simple Green all purpose cleaner. It used to clean just about anything and seemed extremely mild. Alas, Simple Green started to be less effective (by my and other’s experience.) In frustration I added
Greased Lightning to my arsenal. Later still, I had a transmission fluid stain on the garage floor which Greased Lightning didn’t clean. For that stain, I got a recommendation for
Oil Eater. It did work better on the transmission fluid stain that either Simple Green or Greased Lightning. Finally, I had also heard about another heavy-duty degreaser:
Purple Power. So how can you figure out which of these products might be better than the rest?
Well for most products you can’t look
“under the hood” to understand how they work. However, for products that are potentially hazardous, companies are required to submit a
Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) (now called by government decree a: Safety Data Sheet (SDS) ) These data sheets aren’t that easy to read, but if you know a little chemistry, that can tell you a lot about how these products actually work.
So for example let’s start with the Simple Green SDS:
http://simplegreen.com/downloads/SDS_EN-US_SimpleGreenAllPurposeCleaner.pdfSimple Green isn’t as innocent as I thought. For example it has a mildly caustic pH of 8.5-9.5. That’s already enough to irritate your hands - which it does.
Until 2013, it also contained a chemical that goes by various names including:
2-Butoxyethanol. The formulation change in 2013 clearly made it less effective.
It turns out that
2-Butoxyethanol is
extremely popular in degreasing products. In fact it is the only active ingredient in Purple Power and is a main active ingredient in Greased Lightning and Oil Eater. According to the
Household Products Database of the
Department of Health and Human Services it is in the following staggering list of products:
https://householdproducts.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/household/brands?tbl=chem&id=41The
Household Products Database is a very useful resource that everyone should take advantage of.
Greased Lightning, Purple Power, and Oil Eater have another commonality. They all are extremely caustic (high pH.) They range from 11.4 for Oil Eater to 13 for Greased Lightning and Purple Power. Since the pH scale rarely exceeds 14 and Sodium hydroxide the prototypical strong caustic agent has a pH of only 12, these are very strong caustic agents and should be handled as such.
Comparing the Safety Data Sheets of
Greased Lightning,
Purple Power, and
Oil Eater one can see differing ingredients. Purple Power only uses 2-Butoxyethanol. Oil Eater adds
Sodium metasilicate. Greased Lightning adds a product described as
“Trade secret 762” and uses much less 2-Butoxyethanol (less than 1%). Oil Eater and Purple Power both use somewhere between 1% to 5% 2-Butoxyethanol. The role of
Sodium metasilicate in Oil Eater is unclear. It should in principle contribute to make the product even more caustic when it is less caustic than either Greased Lightning and Purple Power.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could simply figure out which product is the
“best?” However, mostly likely that is simply a silly question. The better question is under what conditions do these various products perform the best. The different formulations will react differently to different stains. So perhaps Oil Eater does work better on transmission fluid than Greased Lightning (as I observed.)
What should be clear from this little exploration of consumer product chemistry is that
“under the hood” of a diverse set of customer products is mostly the same chemistry. I strongly suspect that this is true of all chemical products from cosmetics to car wax. Most of the
“flame wars” over which product is the best are quibbling about intangibles, while the manufacturers are invariably trying to solve the same basic problem as their competitors with the same collection of chemical agents.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t differences between competing products, but they are more likely to be subtle instead of dramatic. In the case of degreasers, you might be well served to have several different brands on hand because each will excel at some stains while their rivals will work better on others.
Understanding this, you can make better choices by taking advantages of those subtle product differences to match the best product to the stain you are facing. As is true of degreasers, most competing chemical consumer products are likely to be possess only subtle differences.
Cheers, Edouard
