[ajbert]

My partner is very passionate about being good to the environment. As such we've moved from commercially produced "natural" cleaning products to actually making them at home from raw ingredients. We follow a recipe book that has been pretty good and straight forward so far, however I'm dubious about a couple of the recipes that to my high school chemistry understanding should be less effective in combination.

For example theres a recipe for a cleaning paste which has a tiny amount of liquid soap and water in it, but consists mainly of sodium carbonate (soda ash), with some potassium bitartate (cream of tartar) mixed in for good measure. Given that one is a basic salt and the other an acidic salt, I'm assuming that the water I'm adding is allowing a reaction to occur which will convert some of the sodium carbonate into either sodium bicarbonate or maybe neutralise it, while consuming the potassium bitartate (in much lower quantity in the recipe).

Assuming the caustic nature of the basic or acidic components of a cleaning product do a lot of the work, would I be correct in concluding that this recipe produces something less effective than the ingredients taken separately?

[Aldebaran]

@OP
Your high school chemistry serves you well.😊 Wikipedia has a good article on potassium bitartrate which addresses your question.