Cleaning Your Showerhead: Why Baking Soda Works Better Than You'd Think

See that white crusty stuff building up around showerheads? It's limestone deposits from hard water. They plug up the spray holes, which cuts your water pressure. Bacteria like growing in there too. Your shower gets weaker, the spray pattern turns uneven, and suddenly it takes forever to rinse conditioner out.

Most people grab whatever's under the sink. There's probably something better sitting in your pantry right now—cheaper and easier on both you and the environment.

Baking soda showed up in American kitchens in the 1840s. For a long time, people just used it for everything—baking, cleaning, deodorizing. Then companies figured out they could sell you ten different products for ten different jobs. But the chemistry that makes baking soda work hasn't changed, and understanding it might make you reconsider how many bottles you actually need.

What Makes Baking Soda Work?

Sodium bicarbonate. That's the chemical name, formula NaHCO₃. They make it industrially through the Solvay process—mixing salt, ammonia, and carbon dioxide in water. What you get is a stable white powder that won't hurt you and happens to clean really well. The FDA says it's safe to eat, which is why you'll find it in both sugar cookies and DIY cleaning recipes.

Mix baking soda with water and you get a weak alkali. It won't burn your hands, but the pH change is enough to break down organic matter, neutralize smells, and dissolve mineral deposits. Add vinegar—acetic acid—and you get that fizzing reaction from grade school science projects. The bubbles are CO2 escaping, and they create tiny mechanical forces that help break stuck grime loose from surfaces.

How to Actually Clean Your Showerhead

First, you need to get the thing off. Turn it counterclockwise and it should unscrew from the pipe coming out of your wall. If you've got an older model that won't budge, grab some pliers but wrap a cloth around it first.

Run it under warm water. You'll rinse away loose crud and get a better look at which holes are totally plugged.

Get a medium bowl. Put in two tablespoons of baking soda, half a cup of white vinegar, and five drops of dish soap. Dish soap is a surfactant—it lowers the surface tension of water so the cleaning mixture can penetrate oily films that vinegar and baking soda struggle with on their own.

Put the showerhead in and leave it alone for 30 minutes. Vinegar dissolves mineral scale during this time. Baking soda works on organic gunk. When you come back, scrub with an old toothbrush to remove whatever's left. If it's still crusty, give it another half hour in the solution.

Rinse well with hot water, then reinstall.

If your showerhead won't come off, put the cleaning mixture in a plastic bag, pull it over the fixture, and secure it with a rubber band. An hour should do it.

Why Bother With This?

Clean your showerhead monthly and limescale never gets the chance to build up enough to restrict water flow. But honestly, the bigger reason to try this method is what's in those commercial cleaners.

Read the label on a bathroom cleaner next time. Synthetic surfactants, fake fragrances, strong acids. Some give people headaches from the fumes alone. Others leave residues that make your skin itch if you touch a freshly cleaned surface. When you rinse all that down the drain, it goes through water treatment and into rivers where it harms fish and aquatic insects.

Baking soda isn't perfect either. Nothing we use has zero environmental impact. If you flushed huge amounts every single day, you'd probably mess with water chemistry somewhere downstream. But we're talking about two tablespoons once a month here, not half a bottle of something labeled "corrosive" several times a week. The scale is completely different.

Then there's cost. Baking soda runs about three dollars for a box that handles months of different cleaning tasks. Those specialized bathroom products cost eight to fifteen dollars each. Every empty bottle goes in the trash. Add up what you spend over a year and the numbers get pretty clear.

Making It Routine

Put it in your phone calendar—once a month works well. You'll be busy for maybe ten minutes, and most of that is just letting the chemistry happen while you do something else. Pick whatever schedule fits.

Really stubborn buildup? Leave it soaking overnight instead. You can also make a paste by mixing baking soda with barely enough water to hold it together, spread that on the worst spots, let it sit thirty minutes, then scrub it off.

This works on other bathroom messes too. Grout that's turned gray, soap scum on your tub, drains that smell funky. Same ingredient handles everything, which means fewer products to buy and less junk crammed under your sink.