Home Maintenance For Dummies
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Glass shower doors look modern and stylish and keep water off your floors, but some people hate them because they are hard to clean and slide off their tracks too easily. You can use the hints here to clean your shower doors and get them back on track in a jiffy.

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Cleaning solutions

Try these methods to get a shower door clean and keep it that way:
  • Using lemon-oil polish and a scouring pad, scrub the glass panels with gusto. If the door has acrylic panels, go easy on the scrubbing or you may scratch the acrylic.

  • Scrub with sodium carbonate. You can find a pure form of sodium carbonate, called pH Increaser, at swimming pool retailers.

  • Use a sponge and dishwashing detergent to clean the shower door (and the rest of the shower stall) after every shower.

  • Place a couple of small suction cups that have small hooks on the inside of a shower door. Use the pair of hangers to suspend a vinegar-soaked rag on the inside of the shower door. Reposition the hangers and rag periodically to conquer small sections at a time. This may sound funny and look terrible, but the vinegar will soften the mineral deposits. Really dirty shower doors may require some scrubbing with a nylon scouring pad.

Get it back on track

If the doors get out of alignment, or the rollers come off the track, you can usually reset the doors by lifting them in the frame and resetting the rollers in the channel. When the doors drag, or they don’t stay in the bottom channel, you need to adjust the rollers:
  1. Lift the outer door until the rollers clear the top track; then pull the bottom of the door out and away from the bottom channel and set it aside. Do the same with the inner door.

  2. Clean debris from the bottom track and clean the door frames.

  3. Loosen the screws that hold the rollers to the door frame and adjust them to raise or lower the door as needed.

    If the screws are rusted, replace them with zinc-coated or stainless-steel screws.

  4. Spray a dry silicone lubricant lightly on the rollers to keep them operating smoothly.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book authors:

James Carey and Morris Carey Jr. share their 55+ years of experience as award-winning, licensed contractors with millions of people nationwide through a weekly radio program and syndicated newspaper column, both titled On The House. They also appear regularly on CBS News Saturday Morning.

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