Home Remedies vs Brand Name. What stain remover cleans the best?

Have you ever wondered why the pesky stain won’t come out of your favorite shirt? Or something you can do really quick to get an embarrassing stain out of your pants at a restaurant? Well, for my science fair project I decided to see which stain remover will clean the best. I want to do this project because it seems like every time I go out to eat, I always get a terrible stain on my favorite shirt. Think about it, it is almost inevitable because next thing you know, DRIP and your shirt is ruined. It is time to find away to keep that favorite shirt. I hypothesize that a name brand cleaner such as tide, will outperform and clean better the home remedies because it is purchased world wide which must mean they remove stains very well.

Before being able to test, I had to prepare by cutting a plain white shirt into rectangles and by making all the home remedies. Following the preparation, I had to stain the fabric. I used ⅛ teaspoon of each stain and spread it out as evenly as possible (liquids). Unfortunately there is no way to measure a grass stain so I did my best to keep it a reasonable size. After staining all 32 + 4 controls, it was time to test. I tested by filling up a large pan halfway. I measured the water temp with a thermometer, which was always between 65 and 75 degrees. Following that, I squirted each type of stain 3 times with each stain remover. I waited exactly one minute for each stain to absorb the stain remover. That was followed by exactly 15 seconds of scrubbing with a toothbrush. I used my phone as a stopwatch and switched out the water each time I used a different stain remover to make sure I would keep all the test fair. When completed I hung up each square to dry. Then waited overnight to give the fabric time to dry.

When I woke up the following morning, the squares were dry and I was ready to give each stain a rating from 0 being the worst and 5 being the best. The reason I included 0 in the scale is for the stain removers that didn’t affect the stain at all. The first test I conducted was for Prespot. The results were 5 for BBQ, 5 for grass, 4 for sauce, 4 for grease. I conducted eight more test, four more on household remedies and three more store bought. I came to conclude that Tide cleaned the best for the store bought category with an average score of 4.75. For the household remedies, the hydrogen peroxide and blue dawn soap worked fantastic with an average score of also 4.75.

In conclusion, when testing each cleaner I found that the majority of store brand cleaners cleaned very well and similar. The average rating is 4.1. On the other hand, some home remedies cleaned extremely well but there were a couple of test that didn’t clean well at all. The average rating is 3.3 My data helped prove that my hypothesis was correct. Lastly, if I were to expand this project, I would test different materials too see if that would affect the stains.