Cut your home scenting cost by over 90%!

Good morning, gentle readers, and Happy Monday!

As many of you know I run a home daycare. With only my my kids being potty trained it means there are a lot of diapers and diaper changes in my house.  And if we can take a moment to be crude- a lot of poop.
As such sometimes I am in a position where I need to odor fight. There are a slew of options out there from plug ins to sprays to candles. Most people I know choose to go the scented candle route, so that is the one I will focus on here today.

A jar candle from a place like Yankee Candle runs about $27 and burns for roughly 110 hours.  Here is the cost breakdown:
$27 for 110 hours = about 25 cents per hour.  Doesn't sound so bad, does it?

Instead I use:
water- 1 cup- on hand
orange peel from one orange- on hand (I save our orange rinds in a resealable container just for this use)
ground cinnamon- 4 tbsp roughly 40 cents
(you could also play with other options of adding nutmeg or cloves to this mixture)

Put all this in a microwave safe bowl and microwave for 3-4 minutes. When the microwave is done just open the door for a few minutes and let the yummy scent flood your home!  One stint in the microwave will keep your home smelling delicious for about 2 hours.  Adding a bit more water each time means you can keep reusing the same bowl about ten times before you need to ditch the ingredients and start with a fresh bowl.

So just for fun let's look  at the math breakdown for this approach:  40 cents for 20 hours = 2 cents per hour.

23 cents an hour difference may not sound like a lot now. But consider that you would be paying over ten times as much for a candle.  Over the winter months -when people enjoy scenting their homes the most -90 days, 4 hours per day on average one would be lighting a candle =  $90 worth of candles if only one candle per home is used, vs $7.20 for the more natural approach.  Suddenly a savings of almost $83 does sound significant.

Scent heating this way covers more sq ft of your home than a candle would, there is no flame to worry about, it does not contain possible carcinogens or any of the other possible issues associated with other air fresheners. It smells just as yummy as the candle version but for on tenth the cost.

And I can vouch for this methods ability to eliminate any detectable odor from four poopy diaper... because for some reason all the kids poop at the same time....