Sticks of Stone to Scour Nasty Zones

I am sorry I have not posted for a few days.  I took Sunday off and then due to some bad weather in Atlanta I was stuck in airports most of the day Monday.  Today I am in Orlando for a board meeting of the Assocation of Residential Cleaning Services International (www.arcsi.org).   It is Tuesday so today is a product tip. 

This week I thought I would write an article about one of my all time favorite tools and in my opinion, a highly under rated cleaning product, the pumice stick. We have used pumice sticks to clean up some of the worst messes we have ever seen. We do a lot of really terrible homes in our business and we always use a pumice stone in these homes.

Pumice Sticks are just like the sound. It is a stick made of pumice which is lava stone. Some are sold on a handle and others are just a stone. Pumice works by scouring off stains. A pumice stone is very abrasive so we only use them in two places. First, pumice stones are great to remove stains from inside toilets. We do a lot of real-estate cleans of vacant homes with terrible hard water stains in the toilets from sitting unused for months. Often even the strongest toilet bowl cleaner will just turn the hard water stains blue, making them look even worse. This is when we whip out the pumice stone. Just rub the stone on the hard water ring and it quickly disappears. It has not failed me yet. The other place that pumice stones shine is in ovens. When we do move-out cleans for apartment complexes the ovens are normally a disaster and oven cleaner barely touches the stains. Once again use a pumice stick, with water to lubricate it, and all the blackest build up will come right off. 

Another great benefit of pumice sticks is they use no chemicals at all. They are 100% green and use nothing but water. I occasionally have customers that want an oven cleaned but say we cannot use oven cleaner because they will have a reaction to it. I let these customers know I can clean their oven with nothing but water and a pumice stick. These sticks do have some limits. First they wear down quickly and they can be expensive at $2 - $3 each so I only use them when all else fails.  Sometimes you can find them at dollar stores and if so, stock up.  The other problem with pumice sticks is if you use them somewhere they are not designed for, like in a sink, you can cause a lot of damage. But when used properly these little sticks will scour away your problem area.