At my place around Munich, the water is extremely hard. The aerators on my faucets are completely clogged up and the water stream is just a thin trickle now. Can I just clean them with vinegar or do I need to buy new ones?
You don't need to throw them away, vinegar is absolutely your first choice! 🙌 Just unscrew the aerators, soak them in vinegar (regular household vinegar works fine) overnight or for a couple hours and then scrub them with an old toothbrush - the limescale deposits usually come right off. If it's being particularly stubborn, you can also dunk them briefly in boiling vinegar water, but be careful with plastic parts. It always works for me at home and saves a ton of money.
Vinegar really works well, but a pro tip is to secure the aerators in a plastic bag directly on the tap with vinegar - that way you don't have to unscrew them at all and save yourself the hassle. Just wrap a plastic bag with vinegar around the tap, fasten it with a rubber band so the aerator is completely submerged in the vinegar, and let it sit overnight. Then rinse it out, if needed scrub it a bit with an old toothbrush, and you're done - with heavy limescale like you've got in Munich, that should dissolve most of the deposits. If it's stubborn, you can resort to citric acid if needed, which works even stronger than regular household vinegar.
If you've got so much limescale that you're barely getting a trickle, then soaking in vinegar really is the way to go. Unscrew it, stick it in a glass of vinegar and leave it overnight - then scrub it with an old toothbrush or something and poke through the holes. With really heavy limescale you might need 24 hours, not just a couple of hours.
The trick I find super practical: if the aerators are really stuck and won't unscrew easily, grab a plastic bag or an old sock, fill it with vinegar, tie it around the faucet and just let it hang there. That way you skip all the fiddling around and the vinegar works on the faucet itself too, where there's often limescale buildup. Some people leave it sitting over the weekend.
If after intensive cleaning the holes are still clogged or the water pressure isn't getting better, then you might want to think about whether it's time for new aerators - they're really cheap and sometimes it's just worth it. But with regular vinegar treatments you can keep these things going for quite a while.
The vinegar method definitely works, but watch out: if the limescale is really heavy like yours, just soaking won't cut it. You'll need an old toothbrush or a small brush on top of that to mechanically scrape off the deposits - otherwise you're just rinsing away the surface layers and the rest stays stuck. And here's an important point a lot of people miss: after you've cleaned everything, turn the tap on for a bit and let water run through so no vinegar residue stays in the pipes, otherwise it can start smelling bad.
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