How to clean a plastic shower screen / panel
This is something that's been bothering me for a while. Like a lot of modern bathrooms ours has an electric shower with a plastic screen (or panel) instead of a shower curtain. It was spotlessly clean for about the first month and after that the water marks and limescale started to build up leaving a horrible dirty rough looking surface. This is just the sort of thing that really gets on my nerves.
I'm a bleach man, always have been and always will be. I can remember as a kid my dad used to bleach the kitchen table, the bath, the sinks, the toilets - everything really. Bleach was the answer to all our cleaning dilemmas and it's something I picked up too. I believe the old man used to have a bath in the stuff too, but I guess that's another story. Can't be good for you that though!! Anyway, bleach wasn't cutting it with the plastic shower screen and now that I think about it, it's pretty obvious why. Thinking back to my chemistry lessons (that takes some doing), you know, acids, and alkalis; you need acid to neutralise alkalis and vice versa. Duh - pretty obvious really. By the way I even tried that Mr Muscle stuff and whilst it works fine on taps, it sill wasn't having any effect on the marks covering the shower panel.
Anyway, the answer is really straight forward. It's vinegar, quite simply that. You don't need any special chemicals or fancy, expensive bathroom cleaners because most of them don't work anyway. Just get a sponge and soak loads of distilled vinegar into it. Rub the sponge all over the plastic screen / panel thing and then leave it to work for about 10 minutes. Have a cup of tea then come back in and rinse it down with warm water and you'll be left with a clean, smooth, plastic surface just like new. However, the only downside of using vinigar is that the bathroom smells like a chip shop afterwards, but hey, at least it's clean!
This is actually one of those amazing things that many people don't seem to know about. There are a lot of old fashioned cleaning tips that use every day stuff that's probably already in your cupboard somewhere. For example there's soda crystals, another excellent and somewhat underrated cleaning product.
By the way, if you want to help keep your shower screen clean for longer, keep a squeegee by the shower and remove all the excess surface water when you're done. That way it won't dry out and leave marks - at least not for a while. Hope this tip helps you keep your plastic shower screen clean so that you can go off and get worked up about something else instead :-)