Chemistry Degree

For a year now I've had a leak under the kitchen sink, and I had called out the management company on it twice with no fix and therefore assumed they didn't really care about their apartment, and neither should I.  I put a bunch of pans under the sink, empty them regularly, and otherwise stopped caring about it.

My husband just moved in with me, and he cares a little more about these things, so we put in another service request together.  Well, with Dear Husband (DH) in the apartment looking over the guy's shoulder, offering advice and help and most of all just being present and giving him a hard time if he did it wrong, it got fixed.  Finally.  For real.

Which means we had some pans with about a year or more worth of hard-water build-up on them that needed to be cleaned.  The deal is that I do all the food prep from meal planning to shopping to cooking, but DH does all the dishes.  He had to do those dishes as well.  He soaked one pan in soap and water for a few days, but that didn't work.  He asked me, "Hey, do we have hard water here?"  I laughed and said, "Oh, heck yes."  He said, "Huh, this would be a lot easier then if I had a dilute acid solution."

I laughed, thinking he was being all tongue-in-cheek about the old standby of vinegar to remove hard water stains, and said, "It's behind you on the top shelf."  He turned to me with his mouth open, "WHAT?!"

It turns out that his chemistry education was leading him down the logical path of "acid dissolves most inorganic carbonates, what I need therefore is 1M HCl."  When I said, "It's behind you on the top shelf," I was thinking vinegar, a dilute solution of acetic acid, but he was thinking glacial HCl....  Finally we realized the correct language to communicate in, and he cracked up, "Yeah, I guess vinegar is a dilute acid solution!!"  We both found it particularly amusing that 4 years of undergrad and 6 years of graduate school winds up with the same conclusion many a female is taught early on while cleaning house:  a dilute acid solution can clear away hard water stains, and vinegar is just the dilute acid solution for the job.

He then poured vinegar into the pan, and marveled for the next few hours how the hard water stains just melted off the pan.  It was a great validation of both science and home-lore that I can't even describe.