: Cleaning silver with aluminum Will the silver get broken down (disappear a little bit) when cleaning silver utensils with boiling water, baking soda and aluminium?

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Electrochemical de-tarnishing removes very little silver compared to mechanical methods. However, you may get uneven cleaning and color changes from the way the silver recrystallizes.

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Aluminium is just a catalyst (is not consumed) in this reaction

Silver sulfides are in theory reformed back into silver, so none should be lost. In practice the sulfides will have moved the silver away from the main surface with pitting etc, so some silver will be lost, but there is no product that can put the silver back in place anyway

A large surface area of aluminium, and plenty of heat improves the reaction

In the days before marketing companies selling us crap in cans, people used to use a purpose made sheet of (rather impure) aluminum for this very purpose, it had hundreds of tiny holes punched into it to improve the surface area