One of my favorite cleaners to use in the kitchen and bathroom has been Bar Keeper’s Friend. It is a powdered cleanser with a mild abrasive and acid.  It has really made a difference in some of my cleaning tasks. We had heard of Bar Keeper’s Friend from one of our friends who suggested we use it when we told him about the hard water stains on our bathtub.  Our friend is a professional bathtub and countertop refinisher and uses this product daily in his job to clean bathtubs prior to applying the refinishing coatings.  In fact, he had told us of experiences in which bathtubs cleaned up so well that his refinishing was ultimately unnecessary.  

I was skeptical about its effectiveness though because I had used a lot of different cleaners and they barely even touched the stains in our bathtub or on the bathtub fixtures. Bar Keeper’s Friend really worked on the bathtub and I was a firm believer after my success.  I have used it on our stainless steel pans to remove burnt food, on our porcelain kitchen sink to shine the surface back to almost new, and on the stove top for any tough stains.  The key to using this product is to work it into a paste similar to Comet and allow it to react with the stains.  Then scrub with a lightly abrasive pad such as Scotchbrite.  Anybody who is fixing up old houses would find this product to be very useful.  I’ve found Bar Keeper’s Friend at Home Depot and Lowe’s, and I’m sure it can be found at any hardware store.  Contractors buy this product in bulk for the reasons I’ve outlined above.  It is also available to purchase direct from the Bar Keeper’s Friend site.  (The primary active ingredient in Bar Keeper’s Friend is oxalic acid.)