Cleaning A Water Dispenser Tray

I saw this technique for cleaning your refrigerator water dispenser tray while browsing Pinterest one night and immediately pinned it because ours was pretty crusted up with hard water deposits. Most of the things I pin end up getting ignored, but I decided this was one I should really take action on.  It still took me about a week to finally remember to do it, but I was glad I did.

Inspiration

Embroitique Refrigerator Door Water Tray Gunk Cleaning Trick

Directions

The concept is to cover the object with vinegar, let soak about 3 minutes, then scrub with a toothbrush and dish soap.  I know that vinegar is commonly used to remove calcium deposits, but the dish soap part is new to me.  I have no idea what that would do to help matters, but I figured I would go with it since that's what the instructions called for.  

Before shot.  Hey look! You can see my feet in the reflection!

I pulled out the tray and searched around for a container deep enough to soak the whole thing in vinegar. Since it's wide I had trouble finding a container that could hold it.   I ended up putting it in a plastic container from the dollar store that normally holds our immersion blender parts.

Soaking the tray.

The water spout was also gunked up with calcium deposits, so I got out a new spray bottle and filled it with straight vinegar and spritzed it a few times so it was soaking wet.   

I set a timer for three minutes to ensure both pieces soaked long enough, otherwise I would likely get excited and jump into scrubbing too quickly.

Added a little dish soap and scrubbed away.  Do you like my new scrubber?

I couldn't find any extra old toothbrushes under the sink, so I pulled out my new striped scrubber cloth (can't remember where I bought it but just had to have it!).  I added a tiny dab of dish soap and scrubbed away.  It wasn't obvious anything was going on, but I had faith since vinegar is usually pretty awesome. 
 
I could tell that our buildup of crud was pretty bad and would take more than one scrubbing to come clean, so I immediately re-soaked and scrubbed both the tray and the spout a second time. And the deposits don't show up when the object is wet, so I had to wait a long time until it air-dried to see the real results. 

Eeww.   The 'before' shot makes me realize that our guests were probably grossed out to get water from our dispenser.  Funny how you can get so blind to something you see every day. 

As you can see, the results aren't magical, but it's definitely much better than it was.   It could maybe use a couple more cleaning sessions to hopefully get the rest off and some regular maintenance to ensure it doesn't get bad again. 


I've also got a pin that shows how to clean your oven with baking soda, which is desperately needed since I never clean my oven and spills get burned on.  It's pretty bad.  If I can find the time when I'm not using the oven and enough time to get it started, I'll show you how that goes.