Use This Stuff and Your Floors Will be Shipshape

In my quest to become NOT the worst housekeeper on earth, I am always looking for new products to use. Today I thought I’d share some news about an old product.

I am not referring to Pine-Sol. But I will use Pine-Sol to set the stage. Remember how great Pine-Sol used to be? It was loaded with pine oil, which cleans well and smells even better. Now Pine-Sol is crap. They took the pine out and substituted the chemical that gives Fabuloso its characteristic, congestion-inducing stench. I don’t know what that chemical is called, but if you enjoy lying awake all night with your eyes smarting and your nostrils swollen shut, it’s exactly what you need.

I found out turpentine was full of pine stuff. It’s loaded with alpha-pinene and beta-pinene. Together they make up most of turpentine. I started adding a little turpentine to my mop water, and it worked very well. It shines wood floors and leaves the house smelling great.

The other day I started thinking about another pine product: Orpine boat soap. This is a product boaters swear by. It’s a white jelly that comes in a gallon jug. You mix one ounce with 3 gallons of water, and you’re ready to go. It cleans like nobody’s business, and one of its two main ingredients is pine oil. The other is the active ingredient in dishwashing detergent.

Orpine costs a lot. You can expect to pay over $60 for a gallon. But that’s less than 50 cents per mop bucket. Pine Sol, which no longer works, costs almost exactly fifty cents per bucket. You can get a fantastic product with real pine oil and save trips to the store, or you can buy ten bottles of Pine Sol and get inferior performance and zero pine smell.

I ordered Orpine from Amazon, because it was cheaper than local boating stores, and I tried it today. It works great. I am quite pleased with it. I bought the regular kind, not the one that has wax in it.

I found out Pine-Sol isn’t the only cleaner that has been debased. Lestoil has been changed, too. The manufacturer claims they had to take out “volatile organic compounds,” i.e. anything remotely piney, to make the tree-huggers happy. Too bad. It used to be wonderful. I remember using that time in high school when I put Vaseline in my hair.

Long story.

My last Pine-Sol purchase was a really bad deal, because I poured most of it down the toilet. I tried to use it, and the funky smell let me know I was being ripped off. The toilet was my next stop.

You can find 80% pure pine oil in gallon jugs online, but you have to exclude the word “essential” from your search, or you’ll get 9,000,000 results featuring tiny bottles of aromatherapy pine oil running about $20 per ounce. Janitor supply places sell the big jugs. I should try that, when my Orpine runs out in 2025.

I don’t know how much pine oil Orpine contains, but it’s somewhere between 10 and 50 percent. That’s pretty good.