When I moved house three years ago, I had amassed nearly 40 assorted cleaning products. If you take a look under your own bathroom and kitchen sinks, in your garage and utility room, you will see just how easily they mount up.

They cost you a fortune and most of them put you into contact with all sorts of decidedly ‘unfriendly’ chemicals such as ammonia, phthalates (used in many fragrances), phosphates (water softeners for detergents) and antibacterials such as triclosan, which may be contributing to the rise of antibiotic-resistant germs through overuse.

I asked Mary Lewis, Director of The Sustainability Centre near Petersfield, Hampshire if we needed to be quite so clean. Her answer was a firm no. “It is important to have a good cleaning regime in your home to prevent illness and pest infestations, but there is also evidence to suggest that we are ‘too clean’. The rising occurrence of allergies and asthma in children has in part been attributed to the overuse of household cleaning products.

“Many people confuse ‘clean’ with squirting strong-smelling products around the home. Try opening a window if you need to get rid of smells in the house. Some products, such as toilet fresheners, actually have no cleaning benefit at all and simply add fragrance and colour to the water.”

A Dorset herbalist agrees, blaming the cause of many allergies on childhood overuse of antibiotics and disinfectants. Luzia Barclay, a registered practitioner in Western herbal medicine, says: “The ‘hygiene hypothesis’ is based on the excessive use of antibacterial and antiseptic soaps, sprays and wipes to sterilise the environment. Many children are now less exposed to normal bacteria and their immune system seems to over-react to harmless agents like mites and pollen.”

Great-grandma’s remedies

I am not one of your gung-ho greens who insist that we turn the clocks back to Great-grandma’s day – for one thing, I don’t spend my entire day doing household chores like she did. However, some of her solutions still work a treat, and if they save money and cut down on chemicals in our homes, then why not give them a try?

We could dispose of drain cleaners for a start. I keep a mini plunger under the sink now and when there’s a go-slow I pour in some very hot water, cover the overflow outlet and plunge down firmly to force water down the pipe. I guarantee you – it works.

Vinegar, it seems, can be used in a hundred different ways – to clean glass, in a final laundry rinse and to disinfect chopping boards. It is an acid and according to Shannon Lush and Jennifer Flemming, the authors of Spotless (Ebury £6.99), cider vinegar is best on hard surfaces while white vinegar is better on fabrics and white marble. It’s natural and it’s cheap.

Mixed with bicarb (sodium bicarbonate) – a salt and an alkaline – the acid of vinegar is neutralised and this neutralising process actually penetrates stains and dissolves grease. So before you buy your next surface cleaner, try this: put white vinegar in a spray bottle, sprinkle your worktops with bicarb, then spray over with the vinegar and wipe with a sponge. The vinegar smell disappears when it dries.

Made into a paste, these same two ingredients applied with an old toothbrush can help remove mould from grouting and silicone seals round your bath.

Cleaning expert Aggi MacKenzie recommends you do an empty dishwasher cycle with vinegar to clear lime scale – even use a nylon brush with soapy water to gently dislodge scale from the tiny holes in the spray arms. There is no need for an expensive dishwasher cleaner.

If you are continually using your washing machine on a cold or quick wash, you can get a build-up of black mould on the door seal and stale smell in your machine, which can transfer to clothes. She advises running your machine on the hottest wash with a cup of white vinegar thrown into the drum. Cold washes don’t kill bacteria or dissolve body fats, so you should do a hot wash regularly, she says.

Vinegar even comes to the rescue with Man’s Best Friend. In Christina Strutt’s Guide to Natural Housekeeping she advises adding about a teaspoon of distilled vinegar to your pet’s water bowl to deter ticks and fleas. She also advises combing your pet with a comb dipped in a solution made from boiling water poured on to lemon slices and allowed to cool.

If you need persuading, here is what Mary Lewis has to say: “Old-fashioned products like bicarbonate of soda, lemon juice and vinegar are actually extremely effective cleaners but are less glamorous than packaged products and don’t have the fragrances. Some green products like eco washing-up liquid don’t contain sudsing agents that produce a lot of foam, so we think it isn’t doing the job. But foam actually has no cleaning properties at all.”

Air fresheners are becoming more ingenious all the time – but do you really want all those artifi cial scents wafting round your house? Here is just one clever tip. For the natural smell of lavender, keep handy a spray bottle of water scented with a few drops of lavender oil, or a cloth impregnated with the oil, for when unexpected guests drop by. Wipe the cloth round your door frame or spray round your entrance hall to make an instant impression. 

This is all very well, you may say, but how do I clean my oven without chemicals? My answer is to Get-a-Man-In with all the money you save! In the same way that the window cleaner is able to get my windows sparkling clean with simple washing-up liquid and water – plus skill that I lack – reputable oven-cleaning franchises do not use caustic, toxic materials in your home and will get appliances gleaming like new.

Did you know…?

• Powdered or tablet washing products for the washing machine or dishwasher contain half the harmful chemicals of the liquid products.
• A good way to reduce your dependence on cleaning products is to buy some microfibre cleaning cloths (like those used in hospitals). For most cleaning jobs you can use them just with water.
  

Books to turn you green:

Grandmother’s wisdom

From Mother to Daughter by Vivienne Bolton (Kyle Cathie £16.99) would make the perfect shower or wedding present. The author credits her own grandmother for much of what she learned as a child growing up in South Africa. Lavishly photographed chapters are organised into seasons so that gardening hints and recipes can concentrate on seasonal tasks and produce. As for housekeeping, there are instructions for making everything from scented fl oor polish and hand-cream to pot pourri, accompanied by sound cleaning advice. Delicious-sounding dishes and useful cookery techniques that were second nature for the older generation make this book a useful reference for the novice home-maker.

Bright ideas

So impressed was Christina Strutt with good oldfashioned and effective bicarbonate of soda and Epsom salts when she tested for her book Guide to Natural Housekeeping (Cico Books £19.99) that her company Cabbages & Roses now sells them. The fi rst chapter is ‘Cleaning without chemicals’. Drawing heavily on traditional vinegar solutions, some of her ideas are novel, such as storing dusters in lemon oil with a few drops of vinegar. She suggests removing ring marks from wooden furniture with a solution of one part vinegar and one part olive oil rubbed over the wood with a soft cloth, followed by polishing with beeswax.

Credit crunch housekeeping

Caroline Harris’s recurring theme in Ms Harris’s Book of Green Household Management (John Murray £17.99) is that by going back to more environmentally friendly basics, you will save yourself money. And who doesn’t want to do that these days? She urges readers to keep her book, full of hints, tips and website addresses, in the kitchen: if the pages get stained and creased “don’t worry…it means that the volume has been put to good use… Her fi rst chapter is all about cleaning, she then goes on to cover energy, food, veg growing, waste management, clothes and special occasions.

Save money, reduce waste

There is a chapter on cleaning agents in The Green Kitchen, written by Richard Ehrlich (Kyle Cathie £12.99), the ‘Green Kitchen’ columnist in The Times, but primarily this is a cookery book that aims to reeducate us in less wasteful food preparation. His is the same message as that of the other authors: we don’t need apocalyptic cleaning agents to obliterate every bacterium in sight in order to stay healthy.

Further information:

• The Sustainability Centre, Droxford Road, East Meon, Petersfi eld GU32 1HR, tel: 01730 823 166. Visit www.earthworks-trust.com
• Visit www.herbsforhealing.org.uk , Luzia Barclay’s resource for those interested in the benefi ts of herbs and herbal medicine.