New Shigaraki teapot

[Ethan Kurland]

I wish peroxide persisted- to help with my stained teeth. My teeth has become pretty stained/ seasoned ( ?)over the years of tea drinking.

If you increase the times you go for cleaning from 2x per year to 4x per year, you will be rid of the staining for sure but also the seasoning. I suggest you try 3x per year which should get rid of the staining while you remain seasoned.

[Bok]

I concur with @faj I have cleaned close to 100, often very dirty, teapots and sodium percarbonate did remove a LOT of incrusted material.

I’m talking almost unrecognisable before/after scenarios. While it’s maybe not a deep clean if it’s very porous clay, it is certainly not only cosmetic either…

Centuries of dirt and tea, plus storage smells did disappear quite obviously.

A thorough rinse afterwards is necessary of course.

[leafandclay]

Thank you for your detailed and attentive responses. I do not see anyone else participating in this thread, so I believe we have concluded. Best wishes!

[pedant]

Here is my take on that. I use glass items a lot when making tea. Glasses, teapots, pitchers. With time, especially with aged teas, there is a buildup that occurs. It has a color, sure, but it also has a thickness, a texture, you can scratch it. It can be scratched away with a fingernail. When cleaning glass with percarbonate, that buildup goes away, You can actually see small particles in the water. Once the cleaning is done, the surface becomes shiny and smooth, like new basically. I find it hard to believe that percarbonate would discolor the stain, polish it to a perfect, glass-like shine, make it hard and impervious to scratching, and make it undetectable to the naked eye where it was easy to notice before. I find it more credible that it actually removes the stain quite effectively.

thanks. i wonder then if it's a pH thing (saponification of the stain's lipid "matrix"?), and any base will do. i know after a soak in hot bicarbonate solution (which partially becomes carbonate solution), tea stain seems to just wipe away effortlessly.

[debunix]

Not scared of percarbonate here.....but I also am not using it for daily cleaning. It reacts with the water used to soak the item being cleaned to make water, oxygen, sodium, and carbonate. Per Wikipedia (screen shot to keep the formatting of the chemical formulas correct):

Screen Shot 2022-10-01 at 14.10.30.png (93.5 KiB) Viewed 3040 times

Nothing scary there. Of course, even water is dangerous in the wrong context (e.g., inhaling into your lungs), but these reaction products are no worse to consume than a muffin made with baking soda.

Of course I rinse things cleaned with it before drinking out of them again. And I try not to let things get to the point where they need such cleaning. But accidents happen, and a few things are really hard to clean because of narrowness etc, so once I bought percarbonate for a pot that I suspected of being coated after firing with something unpleasant, I've used it since here and there, treating it with respect as I would bleach, but feeling better about the environmental impact than household bleach.

[Victoria]

Interesting revival of this thread. I actually bought @Muadeeb’s Tachi Masaki shigaraki in the OP. Love handling it, beautifully proportioned, great textured porous clay.

@leafandclay you posted that someone here recommended mixing sodium percarbonate with citric acid and or vinegar, I haven’t seen such a post here, and also wouldn’t recommend that. Like Debunix and others pointed out sodium percarbonate becomes non-toxic “Dissolved in water, sodium percarbonate yields a mixture of hydrogen peroxide (which eventually decomposes to water and oxygen), sodium cations Na+, and carbonate CO2−3”. At any rate, I have only recommended using sodium precarbonate as a last resort (for decades old heavily impacted, encrusted, odorous, and or moldy conditions) after trying 1. hot water bath, 2. baking soda followed by white vinegar rinse. I don’t recommend using it frequently on a pot, because it seems to strip it so clean that it then requires a longer seasoning period, at least that’s been my observation, so I use it sparingly. I also find just using off boiling water to rinse the inside of frequently used teaware, after each use, an easy and simple way to keep it clean.

[Baisao]

The dangers of highly toxic sodium percarbonate are precisely why I avoid dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO) and only source health information from reliable sources like Mercola and http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html

[wave_code]

I guess we've about covered the silliness here but yeah, nobody is suggesting to actually DRINK the percarbonate, just use it for cleaning and then throughly cleaning out the residual breakdown of it after before using the pot. although yes, I'm sure there are idiots out there who drink diluted percarbonate (see the endless scams for 'silver solution', etc) who are the same type of people who are going to take dewormer for no reason or buy sketchy supplement pills that have heavy metals in them. but thats very different than using it for its intended function. hydrogen peroxide diluted can be effective for say treating canker sores, but swishing a dilution again is a very far cry from advocating for drinking straight hydrogen peroxide.

though correct- it should NOT be mixed with citric acid (although again I don't think anyone has advocated for using them simultaneously here?)- this creates an etching solution to unless you are trying to make home made PCBs... don't do that. Once the percarbonate has broken down into soda ash though I do give it a very good rinse to get the ash out and then soak it in water with a bit of citric acid to soften the water (very hard tap water here) and then rinse/soak it again. I've switched to just using percorbonate and boils for cleaning old pots - I tried using distilled vinegar on a couple pots and actually found some highly absorptive clays really wouldn't let go of the vinegar smell which I found really odd considering how quickly it should in theory evaporate out. one of them I then re-cleaned with percarbonate though and then the smell vanished.