
How to Make Your Own Force of Nature Cleaning Solution
A lot of us looking for safer cleaning options turn first to DIY cleaners with vinegar. The problem is that even undiluted vinegar isn’t strong enough to kill viruses including MRSA or dangerous bacteria like staphylococcus. Vinegar isn’t an EPA registered disinfectant and not powerful enough to be useful for sanitizing settings like hospitals, schools or even your own home. Another major limitation with DIY vinegar cleaning solutions is that you shouldn’t use vinegar on stone surfaces like granite, marble, limestone, onyx or travertine because it can etch and dull the shine on them. However, vinegar can play a role in creating hypochlorous acid, which at the right concentration, can be a disinfectant that can kill 99.9% of germs, and is also safe on sealed stone surfaces. Here’s how Force of Nature works.Steps to Create DIY Force of Nature Cleaner
Force of Nature uses a technology called electrolyzed water, which is a technology used in the industrial applications we mentioned including wound healing, produce preservation, eye care, veterinary care, organic crop production, and also in green cleaning & sanitizing to create hypochlorous acid & a common detergent. Here are the steps involved in the chemistry change:- When an electrical charge is passed through a salt (NaCl) solution with exactly the right concentration, the sodium separates from the chloride. Chloride is negatively charged and is attracted to the positive side of the electrical charge where it bonds with oxygen and hydrogen from the water. It gets converted from Cl- to HOCl, which is hypochlorous acid.
- The sodium is positive and is attracted to the negative charge, where it also bonds with oxygen and hydrogen and is electrochemically converted to sodium hydroxide or NaOH. Sodium hydroxide is a common detergent used at different concentrations in products ranging from toothpaste to moisturizer to cleaning products. As you can probably guess, concentration is the critical factor when it comes to safety. Typical cleaning products commonly contain from 1-5% of NaOH, and as a result can be highly toxic to humans. Force of Nature creates a concentration of only 0.0000003% which is gentle enough to use without rinsing.
- The pH of the solution is another critical safety factor. At precisely the right concentration, vinegar can be used as a pH adjuster that can either create a solution that’s predominantly bleach (sodium hypochlorite), or instead hypochlorous acid. The pH also determines whether the solution is at high enough concentration of hypochlorous acid to meet EPA requirements as a disinfectant that kills 99.9% of germs, and just as importantly, how long that concentration lasts. An interesting fact is that in some industrial applications, where the solution is produced and “consumed” on site, HOCl is created at a concentration that dissipates after only a few hours. HOCl is known for having a short shelf life, and that life can get truncated dramatically depending on concentration.