mm wrote:
I bought some Red Devil TSP/90 Heavy Duty Cleaner, and when I got
home, I noticed it contained no phosphates.

Later I saw Tri-Sodium-Phosphate itself for sale.

They both had warnings about eyes and skin.

Which cleans better?

Especially, the soot on my walls from when my oil furnace wasn't
working well.

Are there other reasons for using one or the other?


Remove NOPSAM to email me. Please let
me know if you have posted also.

No idea which cleans better -- I always used TSP and it always seemed to
clean quite well. But your post got me wondering how close the Red Devil
people are coming to false advertising when then call their cleaning
product TSP anything. If their claim of no phosphates is true then it
can't really be TSP. Some quick research shows that the product is
actually sodium metasilicate but how that relates to tri-sodium
phosphate is beyond me unless the fact that they both contain sodium
means more in the world of advertising than it does in chemistry. But it
really does have no phosphates FWIW.

--
John McGaw
[Knoxville, TN, USA]
http://johnmcgaw.com