The idea of finding a hack to make your life easier or cheaper is especially tempting when it comes to cleaning your house, and TikTok is full of such advice. But many of the cleaning “hacks” you find there have superficial results, basic misinformation or disinformation, and the sad state of STEM education in this country. For example, here are some popular cleaning hacks you might see on social media that don’t actually work.
Do These Viral TikTok Cleaning Tricks Actually Work?! Let’s put them to the test and find out.
If you hang around CleanTok long enough, someone will eventually instruct you to use boiling water when mopping your floors. On the surface, this makes sense: we boil water to make it safe to drink and to disinfect things, so why wouldn’t it work on your floors?
Well, mainly because your floors aren’t designed to withstand the heat of boiling water. Sealed hardwood floors will swell and warp if you do this, and vinyl and even some laminate floors will come loose as the glue holding them in place breaks down. Worst of all, the damage may not be immediately apparent, so you could be quietly ruining your floors for a long time before you get to the “discovery” phase of cleaning hackery.
Apparently, some people still live in deep fear of being judged on how dull their whites are, and put a lot of mental and physical effort into trying to brighten them up. In your search for easy tricks to make your whites blindingly bright, you come across videos like this one, which suggests crushing up some aspirin tablets and throwing them into the wash to drastically brighten your whites.
