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Sanitize Your Home for Flu Season: Top Cleaning Tips

An individual using a cloth to wipe a light switch, highlighting the importance of cleanliness in everyday objects.Without a doubt, most people take in that regular cleaning is an excellent way to keep your rental home safe during flu season. But, in reality, cleaning just the perceptible dirt may not be good enough. Doorknobs, light switches, computer keyboards, smartphones, tablets, television remotes, and game controllers are easy to miss when cleaning the house. If you are not sanitizing them regularly, they may hold up more harmful bacteria than your toilet.

How dirty are standard handheld devices?

It is strongly recommended that you regularly clean your smartphone, tablet, keyboard, mouse, television remote, and gaming controller. Taking into account these electronic devices are touched so often each day, primarily phones, controllers, and remotes, they can have ten times the amount of bacteria found on other surfaces in your home!

Contemplate on it: instantly when you touch something and then touch your phone or computer keyboard, you’ve transferred bacteria from one surface to the other.

The more often you touch a particular surface, the more bacteria will collect there, quickly becoming a serious health hazard. Within the period of flu season, it’s easy to pick up germs and unwittingly pass them along to others by sharing devices, controllers – even the TV remote. This is what makes cleaning your dirty devices principally important. If you aren’t cleaning your devices every day or after every use, the chances are extremely high that they might get you or your family sick.

Surfaces you touch every day

Have you ever tried to keep tabs on everything you touch around the house daily? You may be dumbfounded! High-touch surfaces, precisely, get a lot of use, however, may not make it onto your general cleaning lists. By way of example, doorknobs, cabinet handles, window blind controls, and light switches are all touched daily, and every now and then, so many times daily.

If you haven’t wiped these surfaces down with a germ-killing solution, they are surely harboring high levels of harmful bacteria. Studies have found these surfaces typically contain far more bacteria per square inch than your toilet.

Sanitizing high-touch surfaces in your home is especially critical during the length of flu season. Still, these surfaces cannot squarely be sprayed with liquid cleaners or disinfectants. Spraying anything on your tech devices will indeed damage them. As an alternative, you can use wipes designed to clean electronic devices. These wipes normally contain alcohol, which kills harmful bacteria.

For other high-touch surfaces around the house, utilize a microfiber cloth and spray a disinfectant solution on the cloth, not directly on the light switch or doorknob. A commercial cleaning solution that specifically indicates it will kill bacteria will work for your home’s plastic or other durable surfaces. Just don’t use harsh chemicals on painted surfaces, wood, or natural stone, as the chemicals will damage these areas.

Together with high-touch surfaces, the CDC recommends washing your hands frequently and cleaning all surfaces in your home with a disinfectant excellent for the type of surface you’re cleaning. Just be extra careful to have proper ventilation and heed the label directions, disregarding what cleaning agent you take on. By taking these extra considerations, you can keep your home as germ-free as possible during flu season and all year round.

Are you in the market for a new rental home? Contact Real Property Management Seacoast New Hampshire to discuss with one of our property managers servicing Portsmouth and nearby or take a look at our available listings.

Originally Published on November 26, 2021

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