So today was coffee station deep clean day including descaling my coffee maker.
After running the descaling solution through the coffee maker, I wanted to soak the shower head in the solution since it was pretty hard hit with scale and the brief contact with the solution while brewing wasn’t enough to clean it up.
So I dumped the hot descaling solution in a stainless steel bowl with the shower heat and left it to soak.
When I came back to check on it (30-60 minutes) everywhere the bowl was in contact with solution was purple. When I touched the purple tint it turned black (I really regret not having taken a photo at this point). It turned out the purple was just residue but the black underneath was (etched?) into the bowl.
I tried scrubbing with dish soap and water, which helped a bit but the bowl was still dulled and dark where it had been in contact with the solution. I then hit it was barkeepers friend which left me with what you see in the photo.
I guess my question is “what the heck happened?”. My best guess is that the bowl is not actually stainless steel and the solution ate off whatever was giving the bowl its shine? The shower head is also stainless steel and it was unaffected in this way. In fact the solution did successfully remove most of the scale build up on it.
Thoughts?
In the lab, one way we clean glass is by putting it into a strong solution of base and isopropyl alcohol. This actually dissolves a very very thin layer of the glass, lifting any particularly nasty stains adhered to that surface layer.
What I’m saying is that you can do a lot to the surface of a thing without demonstrably ruining that thing, as long as you give it a good rinse afterwards. The metal parts of your coffee maker probably look like the bottom half of your bowl. In both cases, as long as you don’t mind what it looks like, it’s probably fine.