Brightening Up Your Water Bottle
One of my pet peeves is a dirty water bottle, especially after a long workout. It’s nice to have cold, clean water coming out of your container. Previously I would fight with a bottle sponge made for baby bottles, then putting it into the dishwasher, which somewhat works. But because the bottles are much taller, the sponge on a stick doesn’t really seem to do the trick all the way. I got rid of many bottles because I haven’t been able to thoroughly clean them. And my coffee pot … I have a stainless steel one that will barely even fit a sponge. I’ve swished around hot, soapy water, but those coffee stains are stubborn.
I’ve seen those chlorine pills you can use to clean these things, but I never wanted to try them because I’m not a big fan of the smell, possible residue and taste of chlorine. My coffee pot was next on the list to add to the graveyard of water bottles, but it was saved thanks to my recent discovery of Clean Ethics’ Bottle Bright. The product is a biodegradable, nontoxic, chlorine-free tablet that you can use to safely clean your hard-to-clean bottles and containers. This includes your hydration pack bladders (e.g., Camelbak). The formula of these tablets uses gentle activated oxygen (from sodium carbonate peroxide) and organic surfactants to do the cleaning.
Using a tablet is super easy. My very first victim was, of course, the coffee pot. I put some hot water in the pot, dropped a tablet in and let it sit overnight. Voila! The next morning, the coffee stains were all gone. Good as new! The recommended time to let your bottle soak and fizz is actually 10 minutes, but I felt my heavily stained coffee pot would be an overnight job. The next day I tried it in one of my lightly soiled squirt bottles, and the recommended 10 minutes was sufficient. A note of caution: Don’t tighten the cap too much because some pressure builds inside your container, and you don’t want an explosion (lesson learned). I also tried it in my Camelbak (overnight), and it worked beautifully.
Whatever they put in Bottle Bright is amazing, and I’ll be using this from now on. As a gee whiz: The clever developers of Bottle Bright are mountain bikers who wanted to clean their yucky water bottles without the residual chlorine taste. You can find this at Amazon.com for $7.99/10-pack or $11.99/two 10-packs. What’s really neat is for each purchase, Clean Ethics gives the same amount of Bottle Bright to people in vital need of clean water containers (e.g., Third World countries). Unfortunately, it’s nowhere to be found at Hawaii retailers yet.
Click Chick’s Mobile App of the Week: Keep Calm Creator
I’m sure you’ve seen it all over the place: Keep Calm and Carry On or Keep Calm and (fill in the blank). They’re everywhere — on T-shirts, mugs, calendars, posters, you name it. In case you don’t know the history behind the saying, it originally was created by the British Ministry of Information during World War II, and the saying has been revived. And, yes, there’s an app for that! Since I’ve been increasingly seeing Keep Calm paraphernalia all over the place lately, I thought I’d share this app.
With Keep Calm Creator, you easily can change the crown, text and background of your poster, and share via Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Exclusive features include the capability to save your posters within the app so you can edit them later, and you can use an unlimited number of lines of text with full control of which lines appear smaller (unlike other limited Keep Calm apps).
This particular app is free and available for iOS only, but there are similar apps for your Android device for free as well.
clickchick@outlook.com
