Best Home Tips and Tricks: How To Clean Silver and Remove Tarnish

How To Clean Silver and Remove Tarnish

This tutorial on How To Clean Silver and Remove Tarnish is a lifesaver! It only takes a few minutes to do and seconds for results to happen.

I’ve had this collection of silver spoons and serving pieces for years, and never really got around to cleaning them. Truly, I don’t even know where they came from. We didn’t really need to use them, so they’ve just been sitting in an old vase I had for years. I recently decided to purge any items from our home that we weren’t using, and decided to either clean them or donate them. I had read about a super simple method to clean silver, but had no idea if it would work or not. I tried it and HOLY MOLY! It not only worked, but it literally took the tarnish away in seconds right before my eyes. F

If you’d like to see the process and how well it works in real time, check out the video below! As you can see in the video, it works on sterling silver jewelry too…I’m not so sure about silver plated jewelry though!

Read on to see the step-by-step instructions on How To Clean Silver!

These are the silver pieces that I’ve been holding on to. I kind of like the way the looked tucked in this vase, but it was high time to let them shine.

I started by filling a pot with water and adding a scrunched up ball of aluminum foil…yep, the stuff we use in our kitchens every day. Next, I let the water come to a rolling boil.

Baking Soda To Clean Your Sterling Silver

Once the water was boiling, I added about a tablespoon of baking soda. I wish I had done this a bit differently to be honest, because I made a major mess. Next time I will use a large soup pot instead of a smaller one and I’ll only fill it half way with water, because once you add the baking soda, the water boils more heavily and expands, so there should be plenty of room for that to happen. My water/baking soda boiled over the edge of the pot and onto my stove. The good thing is that it was pretty easy to clean up once everything cooled.

WARNING!!! Be very careful when dipping and removing the silver from the hot water. I used a pair of tongs to remove the silver from the hot water and placed them in cool water immediately and let cool before handling.

Next, dip your silver pieces into the water, baking soda, foil mixture and allow to sit for about 30 seconds to a minute. Using tongs, remove the silverware from the boiling water and rinse in cool water.

The results were seriously crazy! I had no idea they would come that clean and am so glad I decided to keep the silver pieces and try to clean them. Check out the side by side before and after below!

How to Remove Tarnish From Silver Spoons

These were two similar spoons from my collection…isn’t the difference between the before and after crazy? I’ll be keeping my eye out for more silver pieces at flea markets and thrift shops to add to my collection now! I just love that I didn’t have to use any crazy chemicals to clean my silver and it was sooo easy!