My mother has kept one in the door of every fridge she's owned and replaces it every three months like clockwork. I've done the same for years without ever checking whether it works. Is there anything behind it, or is it the household equivalent of a lucky charm? Happy to keep doing it, just want to know what I'm doing.
Neither of them fixes a smell that has a source. If your fridge smells, something is leaking, something has dripped under the crisper drawer, or the drain hole at the back of the interior is blocked. That last one gets overlooked constantly and it's a genuinely foul little puddle when you find it.
Ours turned out to be a piece of spring onion that had fallen behind the drawer runner in roughly February. No amount of powder was going to solve that.
Just pulled the crisper out entirely. There was a small lake under it. I owe this thread a fridge shelf.
Keep buying it, just use it for what it's good at. Half a cup down a slow drain with hot water afterwards, a paste for scrubbing the inside of an oven door, and lifting burnt bits off a pan. All genuinely useful. The fridge job is the weakest thing on its CV.
The one that actually keeps my fridge from smelling is sealed containers. Glass with a clip lid for anything strong, and cover cut onions and cheese rather than putting them in on a plate. Smells move between foods more than they build up in the air.
It absorbs all odours, that's what bicarbonate does chemically. Been proven for decades.
It neutralises acids, which is a much narrower thing than absorbing all odours. That's why it does nothing for the sulphur smells that bother people most.
@aura_annie · 6mo ago · 3 replies
It does a small amount of something, and much less than the packaging implies.
Baking soda neutralises acidic smells, so it has some effect on things like sour milk or a bit of old fruit. It does essentially nothing for the volatile sulphur compounds that make an old fridge genuinely unpleasant, which is most of what you're smelling.
The bigger limitation is surface area. Only the top layer in the box is exposed, and it's a few square centimetres of powder against a hundred and something litres of air. Tipping it into a shallow dish helps more than leaving it in the box.
If you want the version that actually works, activated charcoal has far more surface area per gram and takes on a much wider range of smells. A few quid, lasts months.
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@hooves_and_paws · 6mo ago
The shallow dish thing is such an obvious point and I have never once thought about it.
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@aura_annie · 6mo ago
It's the same reason a carbon filter is a big fluffy block rather than a brick. Contact area is the whole mechanism.
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