A one hour contractor class on how to choose a chemical and understanding pH of chemicals.

1. How to choose a Chemical
and understanding pH
Presentation given by Linda Chambers
Brand and Sales Manager
GCE / Soap Warehouse Brand

2. As a cleaning contractor there is a lot you
need to think about when choosing and using
chemical products. And even little things can
make a big difference, for instance.
What chemicals are in the products you are
using?
What soil type am I trying to remove?
What chemical should give the best results?
Are any ingredients hazardous?

3. Beside these, one thing that most do not think
about is pH. You need to understand the pH of
the chemical product you plan on using and how
will that effect the cleaning results.
A cleaning product most often needs to have at
least the exact opposite pH of the soil or stain
you are trying to remove to get it to release from
the surface or material it is attached to.
With using a chemical, the positives and negatives
of the soap and surface are used in combination
to create a neutral, to give you a clean results.

4. Some times cleaners work enough and
some times they don’t
But
Why?

5. Magnetic Road Film
Take magnetic road film how do you clean
it? When a vehicle moves, it generates
friction and static, forming a bond with
pollutants. There are two ways to break that
bond and remove film: applying a soap to
chemically neutralize the bond or using
friction by physically brushing. The chemical
can be either a one-step or a two-step
depending on the severity of the film.

6. Whether you are cleaning carpet, tile, concrete, or any other
surface, the pH of the products you use can have a major
effect on how well the job is done, as well as if you may
damage the surface or not with the cleaner.
To understand and use pH you first have to know what pH
is.
pH was first described by the Danish biochemist Soren
Sorensen in 1909 as “the power of hydrogen”, where the “p”
is short for power and the capital “H” is for the element
hydrogen as it is represented on the elementary table.
pH is a logarithmic measure of
the hydrogen ion concentration
of an aqueous (water based)
solution. pH = -log[H+]

7. The pH scale runs from 0 to 14,
with 7 as the neutral mid point. For
each whole value above or below
the 7 it is 10 times higher or lower
in value.
Value’s under 7 are Acids, while those over 7 are Bases or also known as Alkalis.

8. So when we talk about pH, we are really talking about whether a solution is acid or
basic, aka: alkaline. And for everyone that has had acid-indigestion, then you
already know why maintaining a proper pH is as important to your stomach as it is
when needing to strip a wood deck you are preparing to stain.
You want your stomach as well as the wood surface to get back to as
neutral a pH as possible.

9. How can pH help or hinder cleaning?
Most soils are acidic in nature, averaging between a 4 to 5
pH, that is because soils are a combination of dirt, dust
and/or oily substances. To remove it you will need to
neutralize this soil with an alkaline cleaner. The degree
of alkalinity required will depend on the soils composition
and the amount of build up. Since fats, oils and grease
when mixed with any alkaline form a soap to some
degree, most cleaning agents are alkaline.
Conversely, alkaline substances, such as lime, mineral
scale, rust and hard water deposits will require an acid
cleaner to dissolve them to get a surface clean.
But the soils and stains on a surface are dried on. How can
you find out what a soils pH is without water? Easy you
just have to add water to it.

10. You can test a stain’s pH by using pH test strips. You just need a small
squirt bottle of distilled water, so you know it contains no trace minerals,
and apply a small amount to the stain just to wet it. Let the water sit on
the stain for a few minutes allowing the stain to dissolve into the water.
You do not want to flood the soil but just moisten it. Then touch a pH
strip to the wet area so a pH can be read. This will not be 100% accurate
but it will give you a good place to start.
Each pack of strips should come with it’s own color guide to read from.

11. There are various subtypes of soils:
Inorganic: Matter that was never alive and thus contains no carbon.
Scale and lime deposits, rust, corrosion, oxidation, & minerals.
Organic: Matter that once lived and thus does contain carbon.
Body oils, animal fat, carbohydrates, proteins, plants, mold,
yeast, bacteria, human and animal waste.
Petroleum: Any product made from petroleum; oils, grease, wax and
gums. These contain no water in fact they repel water and thus
they have no pH because they contain no Hydrogen.
These stains most often require another petroleum based
solvent to remove them. No amount of soap is going to
completely do it. But since petroleum does come from long
dead organic living things, alkaline cleaners can loosen a lot of
them.

12. Types of Soils
Last are
Combination soils: these can be any % amount of inorganic,
organic and/or petroleum substances. These are the hardest to
remove since they are harder to identify and may require a
combination cleaner or succession of alkaline, solvent or acid to
completely remove them.

13. Physical Change vs. a Chemical Reaction
Most cleaning involves a physical change not a chemical
one. An example of a physical change is when oils and
soluble soils are removed by loosening or dissolving
them and extracting or rinsing the solution from a
surface.
Most of the jobs asked to be preformed by cleaning
contractors will use the physical change method. Like
with house or roof washing. You apply a chemical that
loosens the soils on the surface and then you use water
to rinse the soils away from the surface leaving it clean.

14. A physical change is also what happens when salt is
dissolved into water. The salt is still there and can be
visible again once the water evaporates.
So too are the oils and
dirt still in the waste
water and is why for
waste water manage-
ment you filter out the
oils and debris before
discharge.
The most common type of physical
changing cleaners contain emulsifiers.
They break up fat, oils and grease into
microscopic droplets that become
suspended in water so that they can be
extracted or rinsed away.

15. A chemical reaction is different. It means that molecules of one
kind are actually changed to molecules of something different.
For example when we use bleach. Natural stains, molds, algae
and mildew contain a chemical compound called chromophore.
Chromophore is the part of a molecule that absorbs light at
different wavelengths that creates color. When chlorine bleach
reacts with water is produces hydrochloric acid and atomic
oxygen.
The oxygen is what actually reacts with and molecularly
removes a part of the chromophore thus eliminates the
structure that made the color. The stains are still there, but you
just do not see them since they no longer have color.
This is also why bleach will not help to remove rust or mineral
stains since those are not organic and do not contain
Chromophores.

16. Bleaching then is a chemical reaction. Since there is no
way this can be reversed even if the water was removed
like you could with a physical change.
And this is why for house and roof washing you need to
use a true soap along with bleach to actually remove the
soil’s along with removing the stains color. It may look
clean with bleach alone but it isn’t.
The main reason to use bleach is to remove exposed
algae, mold and mildew. Bleach does a good job to kill a
lot of things and although it may not kill everything
completely it is the best thing we have.
When a surface is porous and parts of an algae called the
hyphae has penetrated a surface, applying bleach to the
surface may kill the top, but the root below will stay and
has the chance to grow again.

17. Things Bleach Kills
According to the CDC in Atlanta and Clorox.com bleach kills numerous bacteria, fungi,
and viruses-
• Staphylococcus aureus (Staph infection)
• Salmonella choleraesuis (Salmonella poisoning)
• Pseudomonas aerugenes (bacterial infection)
• Streptococcus pyogenes (pneumonia)
• Escherichia coli 0157:H7 (E. coli)
• Shigella dysenteriae (Dysentery)
• Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)
• Trichophyton mentagrophytes (Athlete’s Foot, Ringworm, Jock Itch)
• Candida albicans (yeast infection, Thrush)
• Rhinovirus type 37 (common cold)
• Influenza A (Bird Flu)
• Hepatitis A virus (effects liver, found in bad water, fecal matter)
• Rotavirus (infectious diarrhea, especially in babies)
• Respitory Syncytial virus (RSV- bronchitis/pneumonia in babies/children)
• HIV-1 (STD leads to AIDS)
• Herpes simplex type 2 (mouth, face, lip, eye blisters)
• Rubella virus (German measles)
• Adenovirus type 2 (Conjunctivitis/Pink Eye, stomach flu, ear infection, croup)
No where on this list is Mold mentioned. Bleach helps reduce mold but doesn’t kill it.

18. “Green” or Neutral Cleaners
Cleaners that may be called “Green” or Neutral have a
pH between 6-8 and are usually meant to be used for
repeated daily cleaning of surfaces that only have a
film of light soil or small particles.
There is no chemical way a neutral cleaner will be able
to remove a highly acid or alkaline material completely
no matter how long it stays in contact with it. The pH
difference will just not allow it.
Now adding heat to the equation will increase the
effectiveness of a cleaner no mater the pH, as will
higher water volumes or physical pressure that may
help bridge the gap in some cleaning tasks.

19. “Green” or Neutral Cleaners
Enzymatic cleaners also fall into the “Green” category
because they have a pH range from 5.5 to 7.5 but they
are also considered a Natural cleaner because they
contain living organisms found in nature.
But do not confuse Natural with Neutral or “Green”
since many natural things that can be used for
cleaning yet will not be neutral. Take vinegar for
instance. Vinegars were the very first natural cleaner
man found, since it can be made from many kinds of
living plants, yet it is acidic with a pH between 2.5 to 5
depending on the type of vinegar.

20. Parts of a Cleaner
• Solvent (dissolvers)
• Surfactant (detergent or soap)
• Penetrating and wetting agents
• Chelators (bonding agents)
• Saponifiers (soap makers)
• Builders (multipliers)
• Fillers (inert materials)
Cleaners will contain a combination of ingredients that
helps them to their job. They may contain a few of these,
listed below, or even all of them.
Each of these parts may be in a cleaner in different
amounts with different pH combinations some that will add
to each other and others that will cancel, buffer or balance
each other out.

21. A product must create a set series of events to give
an effective clean.
A cleaner needs to wetten, loosen, break up,
suspended, dissolve, disperse and prevent the soil
from redepositing itself back onto the surface being
cleaned long enough for the solution to be removed
by some means from the surface, whether it be
rinsed, wiped, mopped, sucked, or blown off.
A cleaner must also be made so that the pH is the
correct level and strong enough to remove the soil yet
not too strong as to harm the surface being cleaned.
This can be a fine blanching act when dealing with
particularly sensitive surface with a hard soil, like
efflorescence on soft stone.

22. How do you know the pH of a stain?
• Check with a pH strip
– You can purchase paper pH strips
– Add water (pH neutral) to the stain, only enough to
wet it so the strip can be read.
– Be careful not to touch the strip with your fingers
• Use a pH meter (flat tip model)
– These run around $100 and are much more sensitive
and give better results than eye balling the color
change on a paper strip. Plus many men are color
blind.

23. What else should you know?
As previously mentioned, solvents do not ionize in
aqueous (water) solutions and therefore do not
have a pH content to register a pH, however,
due to their chemical properties, even at low
concentrations, some acids (like sulfuric) are
much more aggressive than others used at
higher concentrations (such as phosphoric).
Even similar pH cleaners can react differently
when asked to clean the same thing depending
on their make up. And pH does not measure the
corrosiveness of an acid product.

24. How Two Step washes use pH.
With certain types of washing, like with Two Step fleet
washes, the chemicals used in each step use pH to it’s
advantage. The combination makes the largest chemical
reaction possible to do the cleaning.
Since most soils on a truck surface are acidic around 4-5
pH then to apply an even lower acid 1-2 pH followed
right behind with a high 12-13 pH alkaline the low and
high ions bind with the soils caught between to be
removed from the surface.

25. Single step high alkaline cleaners, on the
other hand, usually go through the four
phase physical change cleaning process I
mentioned earlier; wetting, penetration,
emulsification and soil suspension to clean.
Varying degrees of effectiveness in each of
the four phases of cleaning often separate
alkaline cleaners even further apart. So two
alkaline cleaners with the exact same pH
may still give you different results.

26. For example, the standard butyl degreaser you use
may have outstanding penetration properties as it
reduces the viscosity of the oily part of soil but the
newer so called "non-butyl degreasers" have an
engineered surfactant systems which make them
excellent emulsifiers.
The pH listed on a SDS can help you to compare
cleaning products, but remember that there are
other considerations as well. Total percentage of
active ingredients (that can usually tell you how far
the product may be diluted), surfactants and builders
are just a few of the other important features that
won’t necessarily show up on a SDS since only
hazardous materials are listed in a SDS.

27. While pH will give you a good yardstick for
comparing chemical products - it is by no means
the only measurement to consider.
And knowing the pH of the dirt’s or stain you need
to clean will help you choose cleaners correctly.
Keeping good records of your successes and
failures can be your best resource.
I suggest that you keep a log of every job; what
the surface is, what you think the soils are, the pH
if you have taken a reading, then what product
you used and at what dilution ratio, also listing
any other factors; cold day, overcast, light rain,
very hot, humid, windy, was the water from your
tank, from the home owner, from a well?

28. Then list what your results were. I know this can be a
tedious, seemingly meaningless, task when things are
working well. But when those curveballs come up, you
will have a better chance of hitting the right combination
if you can refer back to other projects when a similar
problem occurred. Photos are also important as some
stains look similar like efflorescence, white scum and
calcium deposits.
Next I would like to touch on pH chemical safety.

29. Chemical Burns and pH
Chemical burns can be caused by acids or bases
that come into contact with tissue. Acids are
defined as proton donors (H+), and bases are
defined as proton acceptors (OH-). Bases also
are known as alkalis. Both acids and bases can
be defined as caustics, which cause significant
tissue damage on contact. The strength of an
acid is defined by how easily it gives up the
proton; the strength of a base is determined by
how avidly it binds the proton. The strength of
acids and bases is defined by the pH scale.

30. Most acids produce a coagulation necrosis by
denaturing proteins, forming a coagulum (eg,
eschar) that limits the penetration of the acid.
Bases typically produce a more severe injury
known as liquefaction necrosis. This involves
denaturing of proteins as well as saponification
of fats, which does not limit tissue penetration.
Hydrofluoric acid is somewhat different from
other acids in that it produces a liquefaction
necrosis like a base.
A chemical burn occurs when living tissue is
exposed to a corrosive substance such as a
strong acid or base. Chemical burns follow
standard burn classification and may cause
extensive tissue damage.

31. Caustic burns
Hydrofluoric Acid Bleach burn
Hydroxide

32. Indications of a burn
Chemical burns may:
• need no source of heat,
• occur immediately on contact,
• be extremely painful, or
• not be immediately evident or noticeable
• diffuse into tissue and damage structures
under skin without immediately apparent
damage to skin surface at first

33. Damage to tissues
Acids dehydrate organic tissue (your skin) or
only slightly damage your top layer of the
skin. Can feel like super glue. Strongly
alkaline bases like sodium hydroxide
actually reacts with your skin and lipids
and dissolves them. This is why you can
end up with some base burns that can be
even worse than sulfuric acid burns.

34. The long-term effect of caustic dermal burns is
scarring, and, depending on the site of the burn,
scarring can be significant. Ocular burns can
result in opacification of the cornea and
complete loss of vision. Esophageal and gastric
burns can result in stricture formation. Most
burns are only partial thickness and occur on the
extremities. Approximately 5% of individuals with
burns presenting to the ER require admission.
Please remember when you are working with any
caustic chemical wear and use proper PPE and
BE SAFE.