Our Natural & Healthy Home Products - Canada Edition

Three years ago, we made the big move from South Africa to Canada. Back in RSA, we had spent years carefully sourcing home products that aligned with our values—items that were gentle on our health, effective, and as kind to the environment as possible. It took a lot of trial, research, and experimentation to find the right balance between performance and clean ingredients.

When we landed in Canada, we were back at square one. Many (all) of our go-to brands weren’t available here. So began the journey again—of trial, error, and discovery. We started off in an Airbnb where I placed an order for a whole bunch of The Unscented Company items to arrive the day we did just to start us off with something. Now, three years in, we’ve finally found a rhythm. We've tried out many different options, and figured out what works for us - in terms of health, in terms of budget and actually works.

Affiliate Disclaimer: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you choose to make a purchase—at no extra cost to you. I only recommend products we genuinely use and love in our home.

In this blog, I’m sharing the natural, low-tox products we currently use in our Canadian home—tried and tested by us.

All-purpose cleaner

Starting off with a tough one - and I did not expect it to be tough. In South Africa I used an amazing, orange-based concentrate that I mixed with water in a glass spray bottle and loved. I have not found something similar here yet.

Side note - Yes, I have made our own all-purpose cleaner using orange peels and yes it works, but I currently don't like doing it and prefer to buy one.

Another side note - you probably could just use vinegar for a lot of cleaning, and while I do use vinegar for somethings, I don't like smelling vinegar all the time.

Here are the 3 All Purpose Cleaners I like using & recommend:

First up we have one that has amazing ingredients, but one downside.

Penny Lane Organics Cleaning Paste

The only ingredients: Saponified Coconut Oil, Walnut husk, Pumice, Borax, Baking Soda (Sodium Bicarbonate), Vinegar, Lemon Essential Oil, Peppermint Essential Oil.

Why I don't regularly use it? Because it has pumice in (I assume) it is a bit gritty and clogs up any bottle I mix it into (spray or pump). Which means I could only use it straight out of this container which isn't very convenient for all day cleaning up.

Next up:

Small Plant Citrus Grime-be-gone

The only ingredients: water, organic fair trade castile soap and some essential oils.

Why I don't always use it? Because I struggle to find it. I have only every found it when shopping in person at Natural Community. Aside from that I don't know where to buy it (hence why it isn't linked above).

And the last one (and most used):

Eco-Max Natural Orange All Purpose Disinfecting Cleaner

This one is affordable and has okay ingredients Definitely not as pure as the ones above, but it is available in many stores and works well.

Dishwasher Powder

We used Biovert Automatic Dishwasher tablets for quite a while, but I wanted something "cleaner" because this touches what we eat off and make our food with.

Now we use Nellies Dishwasher Power.

Important note below.

Once we're happy with a product and know we use it regularly I try to buy it bulk or look for the most affordable way to source it. For Nellies Dishwasher Powder the best price I found is Amazon, but specifically the bundle with 50 scoops (pouch) and 100 scoops (tin). I have an Amazon Subscription for this.

Dishwashing Liquid

I buy this in bulk and decant it into a glass pump bottle to use to reduce packaging.

We use Biovert Dishwashing Liquid and I buy the 4.43l one.

Glass bottles

For dishwashing liquid, we use amber glass bottles with a long stainless-steel pump (to avoid it dripping on the bottle).

We also use these for handwash (we buy handwash in refill pouches).

To label the containers I use a DYMO mechanical label maker with black tape (it punches the letters in white).

Dish Brush

We use one with bamboo bristles, but it has a plastic head. I tried MANY bamboo only ones and found they break so easily, or they become really gross after some time.

Steam cleaner

Backstory - my husband has been recovering from some serious skin issues and one of the things we did as part of supporting his recovery was to buy a steam cleaner. It is a way of deep cleaning things that does not require any cleaning products, and we could also give many places in our home a proper clean (my husband's skin was reacting to any and all irritants at the time).

We bought one with several different attachments including the mop attachment to give our floors a nice deep clean.

Tip: it is a bit of money. We waited and bought it on sale (Black Friday).

Now that we have it - I see the value in having one irrespective of skin issues. It is amazing for doing a proper clean of our dishwasher, washing machine, floors, greasy kitchen cabinets and more! I highly recommend!

On the note of floors here is what we use for general spills on the floor.

Floor Cleaner

When we first moved here, I bought a floor cleaner at the Calgary Farmers Market and believe it or not, we are still using it! As in the exact bottle...

We use Mint Floor Wash. I don't think the ingredients are amazing, but it is fine. It smells nice. The reason it has lasted so long is because you dilute it to use it and a little goes a long way!

I use it in a mop that has a spray function attached to * it - it my hack for keeping our floors clean with a toddler and for our toddler without much effort.

*Usually, I only link the items I actually purchased. In this case I linked an example because I didn't put that much thought into the one I bought. I think they are all very similar and work well.

Kitchen Cloths

Years ago, my mom bought two rolls of reusable bamboo paper towels, and I loved them so much I literally brought them with us to Canada. I have since bought more. I use these cloths as our all-purpose cleaning cloths.

I find they work so much better than typical cloths and they hold up well in the wash (we wash them on warm with our clothes and dry them in the dryer). We are able to use them many times before changing them out.

I also have them in all bathrooms to make cleaning the bathroom easy.

I don't use them like a paper towel. I use them like a kitchen cloth. I use paper towels for paper towel functions.

Disinfectant

We don't often disinfect things (except our stainless-steel tooth cleaning tools), BUT I had a home birth (probably no surprise given this list) and on the list from the midwives was hydrogen peroxide.

Our daughter was born at home on carpeted stairs - there was no evidence of this other than a photo of her birth thanks to hydrogen peroxide. Since then, my husband and I have been big fans of using hydrogen peroxide to get out certain stains from our carpet and clothes.

*I buy the exact one I linked, and I buy 4l of it.

Stain remover

Aside from hydrogen peroxide I have a different go to stain remover (for more general stains and spot carpet or couch cleaning). This one is something I brough from South Africa, but you can get it in most countries.

In South Africa we call it Boerseep (Farmer's Soap). I use shavings. You can buy shavings, or you can get a bar of soap and grate it yourself or use the bar as is. It is essentially the original soap used for everything.

The ingredients are some animal fat (usually tallow or lard) and lye (and water). That's it. The one I have is tallow, but I found one using lard on Amazon that looks very good, and I think I'm going to give it a try when I need more.

Side note: We also use this type of soap for our bodies, but I will cover that more in a personal products list because we've tried several soaps since moving to Canada.

I add about half a tsp of shavings to a spray bottle and add hot/warm water (it helps it dissolve into a liquid). I have a few of these bottles around the house and if we ever spill anything on our rugs, beds, couches or clothes - we use this. It REALLY works! You don't need harsh stain remover chemicals.

Laundry Detergent

This is probably the cleaning item that I feel I tried almost all the natural ones available in Canada. The reason I tried so many is because 1 - as I mentioned earlier my husband has been recovering some skin issues and 2 - we used cloth diapers.

Side note - I use borax, washing soda and bicarb to strip cloth diapers. Here are the details of that if you want it.

The washing powder we settled on and the one we currently use is:

Molly Suds

It isn't cheap, but I feel good about the ingredients, and it has worked really well for us. It has not irritated my husband's skin even when it was at its worst and most sensitive and it cleaned our cloth diapers despite so many cloth diaper blogs saying you can't use natural detergents for cloth diapering.

Here are some others that I think are decent options as well:

1. Nellie's Laundry Soda

2. Eco Max (most affordable option - we used this one for a long time)

   
   

Oxygen Brightener (our version of bleach)

It is not cheap, but we use Nellie's Oxygen Brightener.

I often use it when I do a prewash and when Elba just started solids (baby lead feeding) I used this a lot. I think it is great to have on hand.

A much cheaper option is Oxiclean Baby stain remover (it is also an oxygen brightener), but I can't remember the ingredients (I bought it to try it). I remember changing because I wanted purer ingredients.

Wool wash

Since we are all about natural living - we have several wool items. Mostly winter items that I've made (see all my crocheting projects), but also diaper covers. For those items we use a wool wash.

Note here - for cloth diapers diaper covers I add lanolin. The wash has lanolin in, but covers needs to be lanolized.

Fabric softener

We don't use any. We use a dryer with wool dryer balls to dry our towels which make them nice and soft.

We also don't use dryer sheets or any kind of laundry scent spray.

Bathroom cleaner

You can use all-purpose cleaner for this. I use Eco Max bathroom cleaner (the spearmint one). I buy it from No Frills. It smells nice and works well. I tried Nellie's bathroom cleaner and found the scent was WAY too strong.

Toilet Cleaner

I am not as intense when it comes to ingredients for items that we are not directly touching - like the inside of the toilet. I typically use Eco Max, but I have been considering just using a normal (ideally scent free or minimal scent) one to clean the toilet bowl because we definitely are not touching that.

Glass and Mirror Cleaner

I bought a method one when we first moved here because it was convenient and I am still using it because it isn't an item that we use super often. I will probably look for a purer one when that is finished, but I am less particular about glass cleaner since we don't come into contact with our glass and mirror much in our day-to-day life.

When we are not coming into contact with something much, I usually look for something that is at least okay for the environment and ideally not a super strong fake fragrance.

P.s. Our toddler has her own glass cleaning things because this is an activity she enjoys (and is good for development).

Carpet Cleaner

We have a Hoover Power Carpet Cleaner.

Like the steam cleaner, but about a year earlier - we bought a proper carpet cleaner to help keep our place irritant free to help with my husband's skin.

Since having it I highly recommend it! We use it a lot - especially the small attachments for coffee spills on our carpets and rugs (also we have a toddler).

We use BioKleen carpet and rug shampoo in it.

Aside from using it for spot cleaning - we also do a proper clean of all our carpets at least twice a year. We also use it to clean our play couches (we don't have normal couches anymore).

Vacuum cleaners

While we are on the note of suction cleaning, we also have some experience with vacuum cleaners. We like a clean house*, but efficiency in cleaning. One of the best purchases has been our robot vacuum. We have two.

*We really had to focus on having a clean and irritant free house while my husband was healing. And while it was important for him - it is also good for the rest of us.

Downstairs we have a more fancy one - it was a big purchase after arriving here, but made life so much easier! It is set to clean every single morning before we go downstairs.

Upstairs we have a less fancy one that doesn't map and doesn't go at a specific time, but it still works well. I drop it (put it down gently) in our bedroom every day after we've gotten up and go downstairs (you'll see this in most of my Vlogs on Youtube).

Then finally we have a HEPA filter handheld vacuum - We did not go for Dyson. We bought one that is ALOT cheaper and works fantastic.

Other household cleaning things

Candles - We don't use candles.

Humidifiers - We a large one downstairs and two smaller ones upstairs. They are on all the time.

Air purifiers - We have a HEPA one upstairs that we got during the wildfire time, and we have a negative ionizer (comment if you want more information on this).

Water filters - We have a softener and chlorine filter on the mains. We have shower filters on all the showers. And we have a glass water filter for drinking and food water (separate post on this coming).

Plants - We have lots of plants inside for cleaning the air.

More coming ...

I will soon share our list of personal items we use, as well as kitchen essentials (for health). Let me know if there are any other lists you would like me to share!

I hope this was helpful!

Carmen