What Cleaning Actually Is

This is the single most important thing to understand about cleaning, and the most commonly ignored.

Dirt shields germs. Spray disinfectant onto a surface that has not been cleaned and the dirt absorbs it, breaks down the active ingredient, and physically hides the germs underneath. The surface looks treated. It is not.

This is why we clean first and disinfect second, and why a team that skips the first step is not saving you time — it is charging you for a step that achieved nothing.

Every disinfectant has a contact time — the number of minutes it must stay wet on the surface to do what the label claims. Wipe it off after thirty seconds and you have cleaned the surface, not disinfected it.

Contact times differ between products. Our staff are taught to read the label of the product actually in their hand, not to assume.

Over-concentrating a product does not clean harder. It leaves a sticky residue that attracts dirt faster, can damage floor finishes and fittings, costs you more, and in an enclosed room can be unsafe to breathe.

Under-concentrating does not work at all. Correct dilution is measured, not guessed.

Colour-coded cloths and mops are how a trained team stops germs travelling from one room to another. One colour for toilets, another for kitchens, another for general areas.

It is a simple system and it only works if every single person on site has been taught it and is checked on it. That is a training question, not an equipment question.

Top down, and clean to dirty. Dust falls; if you do the floor first you will do it twice. Work from the cleanest area toward the dirtiest and you carry contamination in one direction only, out of the room.

Working the wrong way round means re-dirtying what you have already finished — you pay for the time either way.

Door handles, light switches, taps, kettle handles, shared keyboards, lift buttons, the handrail on the stairs. Touched hundreds of times a day, cleaned almost never, because a visual check does not flag them — they do not look dirty.

A written method lists them by name so they are not left to memory.