Turns Out I Was Cleaning My Tub Wrong

We recently had to redo our bathtub.  It started with a little tiny spot on the side.  I was cleaning the tub and thought, good grief I missed something, but when ran the brush over it the spot didn't move.  Flash forward a few months later and that little chip was slightly bigger and now leaked if you took a bath.  So we didn't.  For months only showed in our bathroom.  It was driving Dr. J crazy. The man just likes to soak in the tub.  He wanted to just put epoxy over it but I was worried it would exasperate the problem or really, just look worse.  We'd gotten a number from our plumber on some people who could patch it, but the little spot was going to cost 200.  Then we started to notice more cracks, all over the tub in fact.  We looked up putting a new tub in, but that would be a huge hassle and paying someone to do it could cost thousands.  We looked at rebath but everywhere I looked people were complaining about water leaking, the grossness of the plastic, and the smell.  Finally we decided to have our tub refinished.  It took an afternoon and our house smelled horrible.  It was so bad in fact that we left all the windows upstairs open on a cold December night and slept downstairs in our family room on a blow up mattress.  In the end it was totally worth it though because we have a brand spanking new tub and were able to use it the next day.  When the technician was working he gave me a little talking to about tub cleaning, and I found out I've been cleaning my tub all wrong for years.

The main thing is not to use anything that is going to scratch the tub.  THAT MEANS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WITH GRAINS IN IT!  Ajax...NO!  Soft scrub...NO!  Nothing that is going to scratch.  I also had gotten the "brilliant" idea of pintrest to clean the tub with a dish scrubber filled with dawn and vinegar.  This is unfortunately a NO, NO!.  What the tech told me is this.  Every time you put something grainy or scratchy on your tub you tear little tiny scratches into the surface of your fiberglass tub.  Those little tiny scratches are the perfect place for soap scum to hang out and once it is in there the only way to get it out is more scratchy grainy stuff and it just keeps going on and on.  His suggestion, spray the thing down with Scrubbing Bubbles once a week and then just wipe it down with a wash cloth.  If the stuff doesn't come off, spray it again and let it sit longer.  So there you have it, permission for the guy who has to fix tubs that idiots like me messed up, to just let it all go.  So why yes I will take that.