Restore Shine To Dull Chrome Surfaces With A Simple Pantry Ingredient

Everyone loves the bright, shining look of chrome. But chrome home décor and hardware don't tend to stay shiny for long. Any manner of oil, dirt, or debris can quickly dull the finish and leave your chrome looking drab. Fortunately, baking soda is a quick, easy, and natural way to clean up your chrome and get it sparkling again without spending money on heavy chemical cleaners.

Chrome plating is what we're actually talking about when we talk about the shiny, reflective chrome surfaces on fixtures and other items around the house. It's achieved by electroplating the element chromium onto another metal like iron, steel, or even platinum. It's such a resilient metal, and is so slow to succumb to corrosion, that chrome quickly grew in popularity and demand, appearing on every kind of product from toasters to hubcaps from its conception in 1924 through the present. And the more people have purchased chrome-plated items, the more they've searched for ways to keep its high mirror finish. There are a number of excellent polishes on the market, but baking soda is the effective and economical choice.

As resilient as chrome is against corrosion, it can be marred with scratches fairly easily, so it's important to use non-abrasive cleansers. This is one area in which baking soda excels, because while the sodium bicarbonate breaks apart tiny particles of dirt clinging to surfaces, it does it very gently. Its alkali properties dissolve oils from fingerprints or cooking grease splatter and everything in between, and even when used as an abrasive to scrub away grime, it's a very mild one.

Mix baking soda with distilled water until you've got the consistency of a paste. Distilled water is steam from boiling water that's been captured and cooled back into a liquid, making it free of most minerals and other impurities found in regular tap or spring water. Using distilled water instead of tap water will prevent additional water spots from drying on your chrome. Spread the paste over the entire fixture and let it sit for a couple of hours. Wet a microfiber cloth to wipe the chrome clean, and dry it with another microfiber cloth, rubbing the surface to a high shine. This will thoroughly clean chrome that has become crusted with grime, but once it's done, daily and weekly maintenance with a mild dish soap should suffice.