Vinegar Cleaning Penny

When people think of vinegar as a cleaning agent, they don’t often think of vinegar cleaning penny. However, it is actually one of the most effective cleaners you can use if you are trying to remove the copper oxide that makes a penny look clouded and greenish once it’s sat around for a while.

White vinegar and lemon juice are excellent for cleaning pennies.

The effectiveness of vinegar at cleaning penny coins and other copper items, comes from the fact that it contains acetic acid. The greenish coating on a penny is not dirt or tarnish, but actually copper oxide, which appears when the copper reacts with the air around it and forms a chemical bond with the oxygen. The acetic acid, in turn, also causes a chemical reaction, effectively removing the oxide from the penny.

Cleaning a penny with vinegar is simple to do and only requires a few steps. It works best if you use traditional white table vinegar instead of apple cider vinegar and the like.

1. Pour about a half cup of the vinegar into a bowl or jar.
2. Add a teaspoon of table salt.
3. Stir the salt into the vinegar until it completely dissolves or seal the jar and shake it.
4. Drop the penny into the solution and let it set for 10 minutes.
5. Fish the penny out of the jar with a spoon and rinse it with lukewarm distilled water.
6. Set it on a paper towel to dry.

The penny should now look like brand new, without your having to do any rubbing or scrubbing. The vinegar cleaning penny experiment is popular at science fairs because it is so easy to do and the results can be surprising. The one problem with this cleaning method is that it’s not good for collector’s coins, since the acid can eat away at the top layer of copper, thus the coin’s makeup will be changed. This doesn’t affect the penny’s traditional value of one American cent, but it can severely reduce its price on the coin trading scene.

The salt serves as a catalyst, essentially speeding up the chemical reaction. That’s why the penny gets clean so quickly. The vinegar will dissolve the copper oxide even without the salt to help it, but it could take considerably longer. If you’d like to see what the difference would be, this is easy to do. Simply use two pennies and two containers, one with salt and one without. Measure the time it takes for the penny to lose the clouded appearance. Check every 60 seconds and document your results.

Not only will vinegar clean pennies, but so will many other liquids that have vinegar in them. These include pickle juice, which is just vinegar with a little bit of salt and spices, plus hot sauce, taco sauce and ketchup. While some are surprised the vinegar itself works, they will be even more surprised when you wash a coin by covering it in Cholula.

Before cleaning your penny with vinegar, check the date it was minted. Pennies made before 1982 are over 90% copper. However, newer pennies are mostly zinc with a thin coating of copper. Why is this important? Because vinegar can dissolve zinc. Usually this isn’t a problem because of the copper coating, but it can result in damage if the penny is scratched or dinged. That doesn’t mean you can’t clean pennies minted in 1982 or later, but you should not let them sit in the jar or bowl for an extended period of time. If you do you could eventually see the U.S. Mint’s version of Swiss cheese.

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