How to Clean Your Cleaning Tools

How to Clean Your Cleaning Tools

You probably know by now that I don’t like wasting one extra second of my time cleaning and when you’re trying to clean a dirty surface with a dirty cleaning tool you are wasting your time so in this article we’re going to talk about how to clean your cleaning tools and we’re not going to spend hours doing it we’re going to do it in minutes so that way your tools last for a long time, you don’t have to keep buying new ones and they’re actually going to perform and do the work that you need them to do in the least amount of time possible.

If you could use a christmas miracle this year before we get into how to clean your cleaning tools i just want to make a quick distinction in light of everything that’s been going on i’m going to talk about cleaning your cleaning tools as if you’re in your home and you live your average healthy regular lifestyle if there is a serious sickness in the home or if you work at a hospital or a place where you have to clean your cleaning tools in a certain way please use that method this method is just for regular at-home everyday cleaning.

Let’s get into nylon scrub brushes these can come in the iron handle format iron handle means it just kind of looks like an iron the shape it’s not actually an iron handle but they are called iron handle scrub brushes cleaning toothbrushes and other nylon dish and sink brushes with plastic handles these are actually very easy to clean the areas that they can sort of get hung up is you know hair or other debris might get caught or tangled in there which can eventually make it difficult for them to clean they can also redeposit dirt back into a surface if they’re not clean and eventually your bristles can start to splay out so you just want to keep an eye on that and in the event that you see that splaying you’ll know that you actually have to replace your brush but if they look dirty they’re really easy to clean the first thing you want to do is just gently brush out any debris or hair you can do this over a garbage can it should only take a couple of seconds to do that and that’s just going to make the rest of the cleaning process a lot easier next up you can do this a few different ways you can put your nylon bristle brushes in your dishwasher that’s a really easy way to clean them the high heat is great it’s going to get rid of a lot of those germs if you don’t have a dishwasher or you don’t want to do that method you can also fill a bucket with about a gallon of hot water or four liters of hot water and to that you can add a scoop of oxygen bleach powder you can stir that up and drop all of your nylon bristle brushes in there at once they can soak for sec minutes it’s gonna say seconds pull them out give them a rinse and let them dry.

In terms of how to clean sponges my opinion of this has changed over the past couple of years because we’ve done a lot of work with sponge companies as i’m sure you know and i have picked a lot of people’s brains over this topic so this is what they have told me from the head hon shows at the big sponge companies when you are finished using your sponge after you’ve cleaned dishes whether it’s a sponge like this or one with webbing what you want to do at the end of your cleaning session is give it a really good rinse you kind of want to bend your sponge like this and use it to kind of scrub itself clean and get rid of any debris or dirt that is on there then you want to wring it out really really really well a wet sponge is a smelly sponge and a sponge that is harboring bacteria if your sponge is damp dry and you stand it up and lean it kind of against your you know backsplash or something like that it gives it the opportunity to air dry and a dry sponge is a sponge that is not the best breeding ground for odor causing or other bacteria now of course you can put your sponge in the dishwasher you can wet it and put it in the microwave you can boil it for five minutes we’ve talked about all of this in the past and it does help get rid of some bacteria but i’ve also done research where i’ve come across studies that say no matter how much you try to clean a sponge just due to the nature of how porous and thick a sponge is there’s no way to get rid of all of it so really you can do a little bit here a little bit there but that maintenance that i told you about is what you can do to kind of extend your sponge life but really you’re never going to get rid of all of the germs in there so best practice is to chuck your sponge every two weeks to one month depending on how frequently you use it or when you notice it is discolored or awfully smelly.

Many years ago we tested putting a broom head in a dishwasher because it’s something that people said they did and it worked and actually i found that it kind of ruined the broom so for me the best way to clean a broom is the same way we’ve been talking about cleaning so many other cleaning tools which is just filling a bucket with hot water you don’t even need to use like an oxygen bleach product if you don’t want to you can just use a good generous squirt of dish soap and you can let this soak for a while good soapy water will clean any of the dirt that’s trapped in the broom the one tip i’ll give you ahead of time is you might just want to wear like a disposable glove or something and pick out any of the debris so that it’s not floating around in the bucket it’s just kind of saves you one extra hassle.

Cleaning your room is pretty straight forward and something you do not have to think about too often here’s something i don’t use too often at home but i have a pair handy because i might need to use them my rubber gloves now the way to clean them super easy you basically clean them the exact same way you clean your hands you put soap on the rubber gloves listen to that you rub them you got the back of your hands you get the insides pretty easy and straightforward to do the most important thing for me with rubber gloves is removing them properly making sure that you don’t flip them inside out that’s when they get really grimy and sticky and they’re hard to kind of manage and if you don’t want to touch a dry hand to a wet hand you can just sort of put your hand inside the glove like this pull them off and then you just want to lay them flat to dry separated so that they can dry that’s really all you have to do for rubber gloves it’s simple and they will last you for a long time if you take good care of them.

Whether you call it a beater bar or a brush roller whatever you want to call it we all know we’re talking about the powerhead on the bottom of a vacuum cleaner and if you live with someone like me that’s got a nice head of hair that vacuum is going to be full of strands of hair and long carpet strands and pet hair and all sorts of things strings from your clothing just get rolled up in that little brush roller and eventually it actually prevents the vacuum from being able to pick up dirt from the surface so every now and then you want to flip your power head over brush roller you want to look at it and if it’s hairy looking or stringy looking you just want to take a pair of scissors or a seam ripper and gently cut through whatever is built up then you can sort of pull it out takes a minute but once it’s done you’ll definitely notice an uptick in the performance of your vacuum for your vacuum filter some of them are paper filters that you have to buy replacements for and others are actually washable you just take them to the sink rinse them so if you review your owner’s manual you’ll know exactly what you have to do any part that you have to buy or of course the method that you’ll use to rinse it out. When it comes to the canister or the area the bin where all of the dirt is getting sucked up into you want to make sure that you’re emptying that regularly too much dirt in there will actually block the vacuum from being able to do its job but then even still you might notice once it’s emptied it still looks like it has a lot of dust in there so every now and then i actually kind of take ours apart and i give it a quick wipe down your owner’s manual again we also have the article is going to explain how to take care of that for you it does take a couple of minutes to figure out but once you get it you get it and your vacuum will last a really long time.

You knew it was coming but i’m certainly not waving one around in my kitchen the toilet bowl brush it does need to be cleaned and if you take good care of it, it can last you for a really long time so here is the best way to do it fill a bucket with hot water again you want to use about a gallon or four liters and a scoop of oxygen bleach powder you can throw the bowl brush container as well as the toilet bowl brush itself into the bucket and just let it soak for minutes then you can give it a good rinse and allow everything to dry or you can sort of dry it with a rag or a disposable cloth and then put it back in the bathroom alternatively if your toilet bowl brush has a really deep bowl brush container you can actually fill that with a little bit of oxygen bleach and water solution obviously it’s hot you’ll let that soak for you know minutes or so and then you can dump that out give everything a rinse you kind of have two options there either way you want to use something like oxygen bleach that can break down germs and bacteria and get that brush nice and clean.

There are two main categories of mops that you might have the first one is a yacht mop which sounds really fancy but it’s basically a string mop this can either be cotton strings or microfiber strings but either way it’s like a twist mop you know what they look like okay so the way that i would always clean a yacht mop is i would pop the head off and i would just rinse it and then launder it along with my cleaning cloths so that is how i would maintain a mop head like that so straightforward the next thing is a flathead mop so if you have a flathead mop with a microfiber pad we have an entire video dedicated on how to clean those i’ll link it for you down below but essentially you’re doing the same thing you’re giving it a good rinse and you can put this in the washing machine for a nice and easy clean.

Here’s a pretty lame-o cleaning tool that you probably never think about cleaning but it’s your squeegee and we religiously use a squeegee in our shower so what ends up happening over time is you get like a little bit of soap scum building up on the rubber tip so an easy way to fix that is to use the antidote for soap scum for us that’s just equal parts vinegar and dish dish soap i was going to say dish water you don’t want to use dishwater so mix that up those equal parts and then you can use a sponge or a microfiber cloth just to gently clean the tip and then you can sort of clean the rest of the squeegee give it a rinse it will probably take you seconds and it will look amazing the time you want to replace your squeegee is if you notice that the rubber tip is warped or bent or split then it’s not going to do its job anymore.

We get tons of questions about how to clean microfiber cloths whether they’re makers clean products or otherwise and we have an entire article dedicated to it, i’m just going to highlight a few of the key tips but really that article teaches you everything and it’s very quick so here’s what you want to do first and foremost you want to rinse your cloths after you’ve used them and before you wash them that step is important because it gets rid of any of the product that has been built up and absorbed into the cloth you don’t want that in your washing machine kicking around it also gets rid of debris which is a really important step because you don’t want debris getting stuck in the machine and kind of getting caught in other microfiber cloths microfiber is a very clingy material so the more you can get rid of before you wash it the better off you’ll be then you can launder them with regular detergent no bleach no fabric softener and you just want to mix them in with their own kind you actually don’t want to wash them with any other cotton cloths because like i said they’re very clingy and you don’t want them picking up any additional lint.