Best Homemade Window Cleaner (Streak-Free Glass Cleaner)
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This No Streak Homemade Window Cleaner (known on the internet as Alvin Corn) is super easy to make, is much safer than a lot of the store-bought options, and leaves your windows and mirrors streak-free.
Plus it costs almost nothing to make, so it's easy on the budget too.
I personally think that it is so important to get Home Care and Personal Care Products that are toxin-free so that we, our families, and our world can be a lot more healthy.
Plus, you can save a TON of money by making these things yourself.
And it doesn't have to take a TON of time.
Benefits of Making Your Own Homemade Glass Cleaner:
1. Reduce Toxins In Your Home
Do you really want these things in your home?
propylene glycol
2 Hexoxyethanol
Ammonium Hydroxide
Mirapol Surf S-210
Viden EGM
Sodium C14-17 Sec-Alkyl Sulfonat
Fragrance Palette (The term fragrance can hide artificial fragrances are not healthy)
Liquitint Sky Blue Dye
Ick.
Yes, those are the ingredients in one of the more popular glass cleaners on the market.
Even if those chemicals don't make you feel bad, there's a lot of evidence that they aren't healthy, so it's a good idea to do what you can to remove toxins from your environment as much as possible.
2. Save Money
You can make your own cleaner for way less money than you'd spend on a commercial cleaner. Even if it's not cheaper, I'd still prefer to make my own for the other benefits.
3. Clean Up the Environment
Do you really want to add these toxins to our already toxically overloaded environment? I am convinced that one of the main problems regarding the onslaught of autism, auto-immune disorders, and cancer is the prevalence of toxins in our world. Every time you can use a toxin-free product over a toxin-laden one, you help the environment.
I used to use just plain vinegar to clean our mirrors and glass. Truth be told, we didn't really clean our windows often. Just didn't really think about it.
We'd put some plain vinegar on a piece of newspaper and wipe it all over the mirror.
It worked OK, but it did leave some streaks that were a little hard to get off.
This cleaner, however, is great. I found it on a number of sites all over the internet (not sure who created it, but it's called Alvin Corn) and I must say, it's a real winner.
This cleaner does contain isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol, which some people may wish to avoid, but you can use vodka instead. It'll just cost more that way.
What's the Purpose of the Cornstarch?
One of the things you'll notice in this formula is that it has cornstarch in it.
Wondering what it's doing in there? Me too…
Here's what one reader shared with me:
On a microscopic level, glass is not perfectly smooth. When you spray water on it, the water molecules get caught in the pits on the glass surface. Water also clings to itself through hydrogen bonding – the hydrogen atoms from two molecules cling together. Water stuck in the glass + water stuck to more water = streaking. Cornstarch (or dish soap or oil-even a couple drops of essential oil) disrupts the hydrogen bonding, thus preventing streaks!
Cool beans! A DIY house cleaning recipe and science lesson in one!
How Much Can You Save?
A ton.
Vinegar: costs about $.59 for 32 ounces at Aldi. So even if we double the price, let's say it costs $.04
Rubbing Alcohol: Based on current Rite Aid pricing – $.25 for 1/4 cup
Cornstarch: A local Midwest grocery chain has it for $1.39 right now. If the tablespoon per pound info I got is correct, then the cost for 1 tablespoon is about $.04.
Water: I am just going to call this $0.00. The current approximate cost per gallon in my city is $.002 per gallon :-).
So – it costs a total of $.33 to make 2 1/2 cups of Glass Cleaner.
How To Use
- Windows
- Mirrors
- Glass Appliances
- Stainless Steel
- Chrome
- Aluminum
- Ceramic
- Plastic
- Do NOT use this on marble or coated eyeglasses, however!
Recipe Notes
- Shake: The spray needs to be shaken well each time you use it since the cornstarch might settle to the bottom or clog up your spray nozzle otherwise.
- Corn Alternatives: Though you're not eating this (please don't), if you need to avoid corn, other starches like tapioca or arrowroot should work as well.
- Cloth Options: You can use microfiber cloths or rags to wipe your surfaces clean. I prefer these options or newspaper to paper towels since paper towels leave lint and are more wasteful.
(Note – microfiber is plastic so I'm not really a fan, though it does tend to clean pretty well. A helpful reader commented that rags work pretty well as long as you don't use fabric softener on them (which, by the way, typically has lots of toxins in it like artificial fragrance, so here's another reason not to use it!) - Label Recommendation: As you make more and more non-toxic home cleaners you will know what is what. This handy dandy Chalkboard Contact Paper is great for label-making.
- Color It: Add natural food coloring to the bottle so kids will know it's not water. Beet juice (from canned beets) is one inexpensive natural color or you could drop a bit of powdered beet juice in as well but just a bit so it doesn't cause clogging.
- Prevent Streaking: Some readers have had streaking issues. This may be from impure essential oils or hard water. If you have streaking issues, please share in the comments what brand of essential oils you used and if you have hard water. I recommend only using pure essential oils even for house cleaning because even though it's “just” for cleaning, you still are breathing in oils (and whatever “else” might be in the oils. Another option is to leave out the cornstarch and see how that works.
- Use Two Cloths: To avoid streaking, use two cloths: one to wash and one dry cloth for drying.
- Eyeglass Warning: You can use this Homemade Glass Cleaner on your eyeglasses, but only if they are plain glass. If they are coated, avoid using this since alcohol will cause crazing (small surface cracks) in polycarbonate plastic. It can also cause the lens coating to deteriorate, resulting in less durable glasses that are easily scratched.
- Avoid Marble: Do not use this cleaner on marble as it might cause damage.
- The key to making this mixture perfect is to be sure the water is warm enough to dissolve the cornstarch, but not boiling or super hot. Also, don’t add the cornstarch to the water, add the water to the cornstarch in the bottle. If you don’t do that you’ll end up with film over your glass.
After “perfecting” Alvin Corn, I added 2 extra tablespoons of alcohol (totaling 1/4 cup alcohol) to make Alvin Corn dry quicker (for less streaking) and make it easier for it to pick up gunk.
Homemade Window Cleaner
Ingredients
- 1/8 cup white vinegar (apple cider vinegar will work as well)
- 1/4 cup isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol (vodka is a safer choice)
- 1/2 tablespoon cornstarch (reduces streaking)
- 1 cup water
- 4-5 drops essential oil of choice (optional. Lemon, orange, or another citrus would be my choice here, but lavender or others would be nice as well.
- A good glass spray bottle
or quality BPA-free plastic spray bottle.
Instructions
- Boil the water. Let it cool a little bit.
- Add the cornstarch to the bottle. Then add the water to the bottle. Shake well to dissolve.
- Add the rubbing alcohol and vinegar. Shake again to dissolve.
- Shake well before each use to prevent the cornstarch from clogging the nozzle.
- Spray onto glass surface and wipe clean.
Notes
- Shake: The spray needs to be shaken well each time you use it since the cornstarch might settle to the bottom or clog up your spray nozzle otherwise.
- Corn Alternatives: Other starches like tapioca or arrowroot should work as well.
- Best Cloth to Use: You can use microfiber cloths or rags to wipe your surfaces clean. I prefer these options or newspaper to paper towels since paper towels leave lint and are more wasteful. (Note – microfiber is plastic so I'm not really a complete fan, though it does tend to clean pretty well. A helpful reader commented that rags work pretty well as long as you don't use fabric softener on them (which, by the way, typically has lots of toxins in it like artificial fragrance, so here's another reason not to use it!)
- Label your bottle: So as you make more and more non-toxic home cleaners you will know what is what :-). This handy dandy Chalkboard Contact Paper is great for label making.
- Color It: Add natural food coloring to the bottle so kids will know it's not water. Beet juice (from canned beets) is one inexpensive natural color or you could drop a bit of powdered beet juice in as well.
- Prevent Streaking: Some readers have had streaking issues. It's possible this is from impure essential oils or hard water. If you have streaking issues, please do share in the comments what brand of essential oils you used and if you have hard water. I recommend only using pure essential oils even for house cleaning because even though it's “just” for cleaning, you still are breathing in oils (and whatever “else” might be in the oils. Another option is to leave out the cornstarch and see how that works.
- Use Two Cloths To avoid streaking, use two cloths–one to wash and one very dry cloth to dry.
- Eyeglass Warning: You can use this Homemade Glass Cleaner on your eyeglasses, but only if they are plain glass. If they are coated, avoid using this since alcohol will cause crazing (small surface cracks) in polycarbonate plastic. It can also cause the lens coating to deteriorate, resulting in less durable glasses that are easily scratched.
- Avoid Marble: Do not use this cleaner on marble as it might damage it.
More DIY Healthy Home Recipes
Are you an avid frugal DIYer like me? Here are some more ideas of simple things you can make for your home to reduce your exposure to toxins and save money while you're at it!
Homemade Natural Cleaning Products
Natural Dishwasher Rinse Aid
Homemade Foaming Soap
DIY Scrubbing Cleaner (like Soft Scrub)
Best DIY Fruit Fly Trap
Easiest DIY Weed Killer
Homemade Cleaning Paste
Homemade Laundry Detergent
The images in this post were updated in Jan 2020. For reference, here's one of the original images.
What do you use to clean your mirrors and windows?
Hi Adrienne! I’m so glad I found your blog. I feel like we are leading parallel lives, except you are several years ahead of me in your journey! For this recipe, do you think vinegar+water+cornstarch would work just as well? I’m not sure about the alcohol because we would be using this solution on our dining table, which has a glass top. What do you think? Oh, and would filtered tap water be ok as far as not growing bacteria goes? Thank you!
Are you concerned about alcohol b/c of food? I can’t make a claim about your safety of course, but I use filtered tap. Mine just happens to be reverse osmosis.
Yes, because of food and that it’s an eating surface and not just windows or mirrors. I’ll do some research on it. Thanks again for your blog!
Hmmm…I just read more on the rubbing alcohol. Now I am wondering if it might be best to switch to a cleaner that doesn’t have this. I would try the formula you are thinking about and let me see what I can come up with. Thanks!
Hi Adrienne
My recipe is:
white vinegar, water, drops of lemon essential oil and only newspaper for wipe,works great!
I made this but found that I ended up with a white dusty residue from the corn starch (I’m assuming.) The first time I shook the bottle and the residue was EVERYWHERE. The second time I didn’t shake the bottle and there was less, but still some. Any ideas what I did wrong?
I don’t. Sorry. I have heard so many people say it works great. Did it stay there even after it dried?
Yeah! It did! So strange! I read through the comments to see if anyone else had found the same thing. I guess I did something wrong! I’ll give it a second try and see….
I’ve just tried the recipe you gave for home-made glass cleaner and would like to share a few comments. This recipe worked well for me and I plan to use it in the future.
I am a chemist and fortunately do not suffer from chemical sensitivities, allergies or other serious autoncthonous health problems, but I do like saving money & sticking it to the Man (a little 🙂 by making cleaning products at home. While I get annoyed by the unreasonable chemo-phobia which runs through much of the Internet material available on these topics, I do agree that we shouldn’t needlessly expose ourselves to actual toxins at home or work. (Not all synthetic chemicals are serious “toxins” but that is a rant for another post.) Quite often the simpler products work as well as the expensive commercial ones, and are as safe or safer; even if they work 90% as well but cost only 10% as much they are clearly worth using.
WITH that as a disclaimer, I’ve given some thought to the presence of corn starch in the recipe and honestly find it mystifying. I prepared the liquid portion of the recipe (using red wine vinegar, see below) and tested it first, before adding any starch. (My original plan was to make half a batch with starch and half without – to compare their “streakiness” – but once I made a small starch-free batch I found it worked so well that I just kept cleaning mirrors and windows until it was all used up. 🙂 At the amount given, vegetable starch is soluble in the dilute acid; how it would cut down on streaking I don’t know. I’ll keep thinking about it. I’m sure that starting with clean rags w/ low detergent residue levels and using water with low mineral content, as I did, will minimize the streaking problem (as I found just now).
As to the addition of some food coloring as a warning, I agree that is wise in a household with young children. My youngest is now 6.5 y.o. and I no longer worry he will ingest random cleaning products, so this gave me an idea.
A few months ago a new Woodman’s (a large, multi-service grocery store chain in WI) opened near my home. On my first visit there, about a week after Grand Opening, there was already a cart of “scratch & dent” items at deep discount pricing. From this cart, in a weak moment of semi-economy, I found an unopened one-gallon jug of red wine vinegar for $3. It had a torn label, but I could still read that the original price had been $11.99! My satisfaction at getting such a great deal was muted when I got home and realized the jug would not fit in the pantry cupboard where I’d planned to put it; I was further chastened to realize that – even though I love RWV and use it in salads and cooking – one gallon was approximately a four-year supply at my current usage rate. :-> When I read your recipe for glass cleaner I realized that this red wine vinegar might work as well as the white or apple cider varities.
Sure enough, when I mixed my wine vinegar with water & alcohol in the correct ratio I got excellent glass cleaner with a lovely rosy-pink tint – a color that would actually be hard to achieve with food dyes alone and which is unusual enough to prevent, I think, any accidental mis-use. Wine vinegars of course have some natural variability in their color, so trial-and-error would be required with other batches, but I will tinker some with the recipe and post again if any other worthwhile points appear.
Thanks for your information on this topic. Erik
Thanks for the helpful comments. I’m puzzled by the starch as well. Anyway, I only have so much time for so much research.
I always use apple cider vinegar regardless of the recipe b/c it tends to be fairly inexpensive and I buy an organic variety w/ the “mother” included for added health benefits. Plus, most of the red wine vinegar often has color protectant preservatives. Thanks again!
Hi there!
I am just wondering if you did end up trying the other promising recipe that costs quite a bit more money to make and has no isopropyl alcohol?
If so, could you please share and advise which one was better?
Many thanks!
Tan
I never did. I think it used vodka – would you be willing to buy vodka for your glass cleaner? I am really on the fence about it.
I can’t remember where I read it, but I think cleaning with newspaper may also be toxic due to the ink they use. I know it irritates my eyes and nose when I read a newspaper, so there may be some truth to this.
Interesting….glad I’m not doing that anymore. Thanks!
Just made this. Not only are my windows clean, after being left covered in streaks by that awful blue stuff, but I tried it on my counters and it worked 10x better than anything I’ve ever used before. Thanks so much. 🙂
Wow – great!!! Thanks for sharing!
I make glass cleaner with half vinegar half water and a couple drops of a citrus oil, usually lemon (sometimes i leave it out)
The oil is for streaking, and like you with the anti streaking agent i am not sure why or how it works.
I get no streaks with just white vinegar and water, but sometimes you have to polish it a little extra, because there may be a little streaking but it polishes right off.
Alcohol seems like it would help it evaporate faster and leave less streaks. Have you tried this recipe without the cornstarch?
I am super passionate about avoiding toxins whenever we can, and keeping them out of our home.
Which is why I love your blog! I would love to blog about this, but Im not a great writer, and I dont love blogging, and there are already awesome blogs out there on the subjects im passionate about (like yours!)
So I teach people how to make these things, and I also have a small cleaning business, where I use my homemade products and hopefully help other people realize that you dont have to use chemicals to have a fresh clean home!
Haven’t tried it w/o the cornstarch. That apparently is what makes it streak free.
I would love any new ideas you have – that’s great you are doing this!! Yippee to get rid of more chemicals. You should come clean my house :)!
I have used this recipe for a long while but without the corn starch. With the alcohol, it is always streak free so never needed to try the corn starch. For really dirty windows, I also add just a few drops of liquid dish soap. A spray and wipe down with a microfiber cloth will get anything clean. The alcohol and vinegar are also great germ/mold killers and this makes a great all purpose cleaner.
The ones who are having luck with just water, may be using a microfiber cloth to clean the mirror. Leaves them streak free. I have a norwex microfiber cloth and polishing cloth, they leave them streak free with only water. 🙂 I’ve been looking for a homemade cleaner to replace the blue stuff for windows and bathroom counters though, Thanks!
As I was ‘filing’ your recipe in my NATURAL CLEANING file, I found this and thought you might be interested as well. I have not tried it yet though.
This was posted in Non-Toxic Cleaners, Work by bubbler on August 8th, 2007
“I’m proud to say, after some experimentation with different formulas, that I’ve developed a no-streak household non-toxic glass cleaner. The one I had been using prior, which is all over the internet, was a vinegar/water combination with a little bit of cornstarch thrown in. This worked just fine for me, but apparently most people are just too lazy to use the arm muscle to rub all of it in so that it doesn’t streak. So I set myself the task of developed a non-streaking glass cleaner, with the most minimal input of materials possible. One formula I tried was with rubbing alcohol, and this one worked exceedingly well, but I had 2 problems with it: 1) it smells like rubbing alcohol!, and 2) the ratio of isopropyl alcohol to water just seemed too high to me to make it cost effective on an institutional level in comparison to my original formula.
The second formula I tried, and this one was my own concoction, was with hydrogen peroxide and water, with a pinch of Dr. Bronners liquid castile soap thrown in. This worked well, and it smelled pleasant as well, so I fiddled around with it to see how little hydrogen peroxide I could get away with putting in there and have it still be effective.
The resulting formula is as follows:
2 cups hydrogen peroxide (normal over-the-counter 3% stuff)
1-2 drops of Dr Bronner’s liquid castile soap
1 gallon of water
Modify according to your dispensing system, of course. If you are putting directly into a spray bottle, that would be an 8-to-1 ratio.
It sprays a lot of liquid onto the mirror or glass at first appearance, but even if you don’t rub it all in, it all evaporates without any streaking in the test trials that I have done so far.
The formula may require some tweaking; I’m going to perform some more tests on it before switching over all my 55+ glass cleaning spray bottles.”