Secrets of Baking Soda

Product Description

Sodium bicarbonate is one of the most useful compounds that’s ever been known to man. For one thing, it’s non-toxic and environmentally friendly when you compare it to quite a few other harsher chemicals, but even more importantly, it’s so versatile in what it can clean around the house: plumbing, kitchen cleaning, cooking, personal hygiene, industrial uses, you name it. You might be asking where you can find some of this sodium bicarbonate if it can really do all of those things. Believe it or not, you probably already have a box or two of it sitting somewhere in your home, only it’s called by another name: baking soda. That’s right, baking soda is easily one of the most versatile and effective cleaning materials out there, and it’s typically very cost-efficient as well. In due course, you may ask yourself why you’re even using ‘specialized cleaning materials’ when you could just as easily be using baking soda. However, baking soda is not a naturally occurring compound. There are a couple of different ways to put together sodium bicarbonate, but the most prominent way is to use carbon dioxide and mix it with ammonia and a solution of sodium chloride. This will form sodium bicarbonate, which is then heated to take the form of soda ash. Pure sodium bicarbonate can then be extracted from this ash. However, the process to making the baking soda that we use in our homes is not yet complete. The soda ash can be manufactured from inexhaustible resources, and once it is created, it will be placed into a centrifuge that effectively separates the liquid from the bicarbonate crystals. These crystals can then be dissolved to form the more familiar bicarbonate solution. Any materials that are insoluble will be filtered out. Carbon dioxide can then be pumped into the base of sodium bicarbonate. As the solution reacts with the carbon dioxide, it will form crystals of sodium bicarbonate. These crystals will then be gathered together and dried to form the baking soda that we can buy from the store. Now that you know how baking soda is made, we’ll explore how we can utilize it in our everyday lives throughout this book. We’ll first discuss an overview of the general applications of baking soda before diving into the specific uses it has around the house and in our personal hygiene, and then close with an array of little known uses where baking soda can make your life tremendously easier.