Porcelain or Enamel

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 344, 25 January 1946, Page 21

Porcelain or Enamel

Dear Aunt Daisy, We are faced with the problem of buying a new bath, and would like a porcelain one; but I have noticed that some are very difficult to keep clean, while others only need wiping over with a soapy cloth. Can you tell me if there’s any way of knowing which is the easy one? Or is it the water? Spring water is harder than rain water. There is also an enamel kind of bath. Do these stand the same wear as the porcelain one? We have children, and the bath has to stand up to pretty solid wear.

Te

Kuiti

I think porcelain baths are always easier to clean, ‘and they wear excellently. The danger is to break or crack them, by dropping a heavy article into the bath. I often have requests for advice about how to mend a porcelain basin in a bathroom. But it is almost as bad to drop a heavy article into an enamel bath, because you will chip of: the enamel and the iron will show. Moreover, the enamel cannot be repaired -for it is really a glass surface, baked on with intense heat. At the present time, however, no porcelain baths are obtainable in New Zealand, and if you have a new one now, it will have to be enamel, In any case, use a non-abrasive and non-acid cleaner, for if the glaze is once spoilt, it can never be replaced, and the surface, being roughenéd, will absorb every scrap of grease and dirt trom soap etc., and the bath will never look clean, (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) besides being very hard to do, Kerosene and whiting make a good cleaner-damp the cloth with kerosene and dip it into the powdered whiting. There are also g00d non-abrasive cleaners on the matr-ket-liquid, paste, and powder.