What Happens If You Mix White Vinegar And Pine-Sol?

Vinegar is a potent cleaning agent in its own right, and it's almost never a good idea to combine it with other cleaning chemicals. Mixed with bleach, it produces chlorine gas, and combining vinegar and hydrogen peroxide produces corrosive peracetic acid. When you mix vinegar with baking soda, it generates a fizzy volcano and leaves an essentially useless cleaning paste. Mixing vinegar with Pine-Sol doesn't do anything dangerous, like generating toxic gases, but it doesn't do anything helpful, either. In fact, the combination is a less effective cleaner than either component used separately.

Pine-Sol is an alkaline cleaner. The alkalinity helps loosen the bonds holding dirt to the surface you're cleaning. Vinegar, on the other hand, is an acid, and acidic and alkaline solutions neutralize each other when you mix them. Vinegar weakens the surfactant action of Pine-Sol, and Pine-Sol weakens the corrosive properties of vinegar. The result is a solution that leaves streaks — and possibly a dull film — when you use it for cleaning. 

Another reason you don't want to mix vinegar and Pine-Sol is that the aroma is not what you would call refreshing. Pine-Sol has been carefully crafted to produce a pleasant scent reminiscent of a pine forest, but vinegar has an acrid, pungent aroma. Mix them together and the result is strange. It isn't the type of odor that will impress anyone who smells it lingering throughout the house. 

Pine-Sol and vinegar have different properties and different uses, and the best way to take advantage of them is to use each product separately. Because Pine-Sol is a cleaner, it's a better choice than vinegar for lifting grime off countertops, walls, and floors. Simply mix the product with water in the proportions recommended on the bottle, and wipe away. If you use Pine-Sol by itself, it will leave the area in which you use it smelling pleasantly fresh.

Vinegar, being acidic, cleans by dissolving stains rather than lifting them. You can mix it with equal parts water to clean sticky floors (even the Pine-Sol website recommends this), but be careful, because the corrosive properties of vinegar can dull a wooden floor's finish and etch natural stone and laminate surfaces. Pine-Sol also has limitations. Don't use it on marble, aluminum, or copper, as well as bare, oiled, or waxed wood.

Vinegar is great for dissolving hard water stains, rust, and some food stains, but its disinfecting abilities are often overstated. It is not approved by the EPA as a disinfectant or sanitizer, whereas Pine-Sol Original is approved for this purpose. So if you want to disinfect your floors — or any other surface — and have them smelling fresh when you're done, use Pine-Sol.