How To Make A DIY Scented Vinegar Cleaning Spray

Make your home sparkle and smell amazing, with my easy thrifty guide on how to make a DIY scented vinegar cleaning spray using leftover herbs and/or citrus peels.

White vinegar is a pretty amazing household cleaner. I love it, and have been using it for years and years to clean my home, and would not be without the stuff.

There’s so much to love about vinegar. It is incredibly cheap. It’s super effective – cutting through dirt, grease, odours, and soap scum like nothing else. And it’s so versatile. Vinegar can be used to clean in a myriad of different ways – replacing the need for lots of different plastic bottles of cleaning products.

Swapping to vinegar for cleaning makes good health sense too. Conventional cleaning products have also been found to be as bad for your lungs as smoking 20 cigarettes a day. 

Plus, this non-toxic ingredient is kinder to the environment than pretty much most cleaning products you can buy. In short, it’s a bit of a miracle cleaning product when you think about it.

However, there is one downside to vinegar, and it’s quite a biggie. Vinegar smells of, well, vinegar. Which isn’t entirely ideal sometimes, and isn’t to everyone’s taste. Particularly if you are using it in a small space.

If you want to try using vinegar to clean your home but aren’t so keen on the smell, then making a scented vinegar cleaning spray is the way to go. You get all the benefits of using vinegar, but it doesn’t smell like you’ve been munching on chips! Here’s my favourite thrifty way to make it.

How To Make A Herb Or Citrus Infused Scented Vinegar Cleaning Spray

While you can use essential oils to fragrance vinegar, the cheapest, thriftiest and most zero-waste option is to use kitchen scraps and herbs picked straight from your garden, or any left over herbs from cooking, to make an infused vinegar cleaning spray. If you have any pine clippings from your garden, or even some branches from your Christmas tree, then you can even make pine-infused vinegar for cleaning.

You see, infusing the vinegar with citrus peelings and/or botanicals creates a fresh scent, that smells better and less chip shop-like. Plus it’s lighter on the pocket.

Consider the recipe as a rough guide. Omit the herbs if you just have citrus peels. Omit the citrus peels if you just have herbs. And feel free to play around with it based on what you have growing in your garden or have leftover from cooking. You can use a variety of different herbs, such as mint, lavender, lemon balm, cloves, cinnamon, etc to create some wonderful aromas without spending much money.

You Will Need

• 500 ml white vinegar. Never malt, white wine vinegar, rice vinegar or any other variety: just white! Here’s where I buy my vinegar for cleaning in bulk, cheaply.
• A large glass jar with a lid.
• Orange, lemon, or lime peel (you can freeze fruit peelings as you go, to reduce food waste. Just pop them in a bag in the freezer. When you have enough to make the infused vinegar, there’s no need to defrost the peelings, simply use them from frozen). 
• A handful of your favourite fresh herbs – or whatever you have leftover from cooking.
• A 500 ml glass spray bottle. Here’s where I source my glass bottles from.
• A spray nozzle (re-use one from an old cleaning products bottle).

Method

• Pour 500 ml of white vinegar into a clean glass jar.
• Add a good handful of citrus peel to the jar (at least two oranges worth of peel per 500 ml of vinegar) and/or a large handful of fresh herbs, and pop the lid on.
• Leave the jar in a dark spot to infuse for at least 14 days. If you leave it longer the scent will be stronger.
• After 14 days (or longer), sieve the vinegar, and pop the peels/herbs into your compost bin. Decant half of the vinegar back into the jar for use later, and decant the other half of the vinegar into your spray bottle. 
• Top up the vinegar in the bottle with cooled boiled water – so the vinegar and water are in a 50/50 solution – and place the spray nozzle on the bottle. Now you’re good to go.

How To Use Your Cleaning Spray

Shake well before use, and then use this spray as you would any other cleaning product. However do not use it on granite, marble, or natural stone, as it will damage these surfaces.

It’s also incredibly important that you never mix this cleaning spray, or any other cleaning products containing vinegar, with bleach, or any cleaning products that contain bleach. This is because it can release gases that can be harmful to your health. Here’s more information on what not to clean with vinegar to help keep you right.

And as with any cleaning product – homemade or otherwise – make sure to store your spray and the undiluted mixture in labelled containers, away from children and pets.

How To Store Your Scented Vinegar

Your diluted cleaning spray should keep for around 8 weeks. Dispose of it sooner if it starts to look or smell a bit funny. Undiluted it should keep indefinitely, but again, discard it if it shows any sign of going off.

Other Top Tips

If you still don’t like the smell, try adding a few drops of your favourite essential oil to the diluted solution. And if all else fails, try this citric acid cleaning spray, which has all the non-toxic benefits of vinegar, without the chip shop smell!