Ming’s Wisdom

Aluminum foil is usually used for covering food, but can also become the best window blinds you can buy. The summer sun when shone directly into your window contains a lot of energy that heats up your room. Some belongings are especially sensitive to heat: computers can overheat when performing processor or graphics intensive tasks, posters can expand and wrinkle, and some plastics can melt. All of these have happened to me since my window faces west, taking in the bulk of the afternoon sun’s light energy. What I decided to do is cover the window completely with aluminum foil, but you could also lace your blinds with strips of aluminum foil for a more appealing look. This works amazingly well, since aluminum foil has a reflectivity of 80% or 88%, depending on if you use the dull side or the shiny side to face the sun. Putting the foil up in the summer immediately reduced my room’s temperature by around 10 degrees. As a side benefit, at night when the sun is down, light is reflected back into your room to keep it well lit. If you decide to attach aluminum foil to your window, I would recommend attaching it to a detachable cardboard so that you can remove and put back the reflective surface when desired, such as when you want some heat to shine in during a cold winter morning.

Another use for aluminum foil is to remove rust. Aluminum foil can be dipped in water, then used to rub surfaces to remove rust. The friction and heat from the rubbing will cause aluminum to oxidize, pulling oxygen atoms from wherever it can to produce aluminum oxide. A convenient source of oxygen is the rust, and when the aluminum leaches away oxygen atoms, rust loses one of its essential components and disappears, leaving behind a shiny iron or steel surface.

Toothpaste can be a great wall cleaner. Shoe or bed-frame marks on walls proved to be very hard to remove from walls. However, with a little toothpaste and a paper towel, light wiping removed the marks easily, and even improved the whiteness of the surrounding areas that were touched by the paper towel and toothpaste. The only disadvantage of toothpaste over certain cleaning products is its cost, so it might be worth trying cheaper cleaning products first and only resorting to the toothpaste when they don’t do the job. Toothpaste is also amazing for when you get a new electronic gadget or other toy, and taking off the price tag label leaves a sticky mess on an otherwise shiny smooth surface. The sticky glue is no match for Mr. Toothpaste.

The best product that can be used for originally unintended purposes though, is contact lens fluid. It does an amazing job of cleaning clothing that contains organic stains (almost anything you get on your clothes is organic; food, drinks, grass stains, oil, etc). For example, some oily stir-fry drops on your expensive pants, if you get a cut playing some ball and a little blood gets on your shirt, or any other instance of getting something dirty on a piece of clothing that cannot be washed off by conventional means, all can be remedied by pouring some contact lens fluid on the stain, and rubbing until the stain is gone. It’s recommended that you use soft contact lens fluid labeled “no rub” so that the fluid goes through the full protein dissolving process, but you should still rub the stain to give it some help. I discovered this after realizing that contact lens fluid works by dissolving proteins from your eyes that ended up on the lenses, so why wouldn’t the fluid dissolve proteins in organic stains? Any food or drink stain should contain a lot of organic compounds, and dissolving them leaves you with a cleaner garment. So far this technique has proven to be quite useful for me, as I haven’t found a case yet that the fluid could not clean. If you give it a try, let me know how it goes!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 23:45 and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.