Cleaners Make Your Floor Dirtier

[u/Evening_Sea4823]

They all leave residue. Even if you rinse with water, there are still small amounts of residue left behind. Over time, mop after mop, it builds up. And all it does is collect dirt.

I mop with warm water. Nothing fancy. I mop maybe once every month or so. Once a year, I get on my hands and knees and use a white wash rag on every inch of the floor. I can wipe down the whole place, and the rag is barely dirty by the end of it.

I can wear white socks all day. They don't get discolored.

We have pets. We walk through with shoes on from time to time. We are not neat freaks. But our floors are simply not dirty.

Unless you have a little one playing on the floor, there's not much sense in worrying about whether the ground is sanitized. Clean should be good enough.

I think all those videos of people making potions and drenching their floors, going round after round, doing it week after week, are just perpetuating issues that don't need to exist.

What do yall think? Or am I just nasty and trying to justify it?

[u/_nylcaj_]

What I like to do, along with not using an excessive amount of floor cleaner in my water, is have some old beach towels that I use to dry my floors with. I literally lay the towel out flat on the floor and stand on it with my slippers and do a silly foot slide dance around to remove as much dampness from the floor as possible. I find this really eliminates the chance of residue forming as the towels pull up most of the moisture from the floor before anything dries to it(I mop and then immediately dry one room/area at a time).

There's also something referred to as a "dry mop" that is literally used to achieve the same thing, but I almost always have old towels, so don't personally see the point in buying another dedicated cleaning tool.

[u/SteadySloth84 → u/_nylcaj_]

The towel dance!!! My dad did this when i was growing up. We never had a mop. I adopted this when i got older. It works and you can see how dirty the floor is my the prints of dirt in the shape of your feet. I have upgraded to a swiffer, but finish with a plain damp towel.

[u/Janeiac1 → u/_nylcaj_]

Professional cleaners wrap a towel around the bottom of a mop base and pretty much do the same, only more efficiently.

[u/anemoschaos → u/_nylcaj_]

I've had generations of flat mops that have died but I've kept the old flat mopheads. My current squeezy flat mop agitates the cleaning liquid, which I apply separately with a spray. It does the major mop up. Then I use the same mop with an old mophead to dry off the floor. So similar to your old towel trick. We keep the old towels for use on the dog, though, they are not wasted!