Things that have shocked me as a cleaner

[CleaningDiscoveries]

I have 15 clients a week

95% use ‘disposable ‘ wipes

90% don’t recycle (I root through their bins & recycle but it’s obviously only 1 day a week)

Not advocating for either way but if anyone does fancy using reusable wipes I bought a few packets of 6 baby cloths in Poundland to use as make up remover cloths. They’re very soft and would be perfect for babies (which Is what they’re actually marketed as) they’re yellow and grey patterned. Although I bought them last year so maybe the pattern has changed.

Gawd, yes, doesn't recycle and uses wipes, clap them in irons!

Gimme a break! It's a laugh every time some eco warriors bang on about straws and wipes and yet they have procreated (often more than once) when the biggest threat to the planet of all is overpopulation.

Are you all talking about bottom wipes or surface wipes? I don't understand why anyone would flush a surface wipe!

Wipes are actually made of plastic. They 'flush' but they do not breakdown the way toilet paper does. Labelling them 'flushable' and 'biodegradable' is misleading and companies are going to have to stop doing that soon. They should NEVER go down the toilet. Cleaning is easily done with simple cotton cloths and clea I g fluid/water. I use old t shirts/ tea towels/vests cut in half as my cleaning clothes. Wet wipes are totally unnecessary.

I use sponges. Those are plastic, too. I'm going to HELL.

Why can't you wash cloths with fabric softener???? I do it all the time with my micro fibre cloths and nothing bad has ever happened....,

I'm more shocked by the fact that the Op's clients aren't whole people. 95% of 15 is 14.25. Someone is obviously only considered 3/4 of a person by the OP. Or does someone only use wipes 1/4 of the time?
And 90% of 15 is 13.5 people, so someone else is only a half. Or two people are only considered 3/4 of a true person.

This is truly worrying.

Why can't you wash cloths with fabric softener???? I do it all the time with my micro fibre cloths and nothing bad has ever happened.... Of course ,there's no way you could tell the difference between a cloth washed with softener and one without. You'd have to be using gallons of the stuff to make a cloth incapable of being used!

An ad for 'Water Wipes' just came up in my sidebar.

You know, if all women had the physical and mental reserves to do all the cleaning and use all reusable products, most cleaners would be out of a job.

Eco cloths and eucalyptus oil
Be very careful using eucalyptus oil as it is extremely toxic!

Ex cleaner here.

I got booked on a 4 hour cleaning job once. When I arrived I realised it was a student house. I lasted an hour and walked off the job. Bag of frozen peas down the sofa that had defrosted and left pea juice everywhere. Plates with takeout that I'm guessing had been there for days, forks were practically glued to the plates. Bathroom had wee all over the seat and floor and it was bright yellow. There was smashed glass in the bath and a massive poo in the shower.

Found found a dead rat in a mop bucket. No thanks.

Generally I had nice clients though. Although it used to amaze me that clients would give me so many cleaning products and then like 2 cloths to clean the house with.

I used around 10 cloths per house, sometimes more. I ended up keeping a bucket of emergency cloths in my car after a while. How can you clean an entire house with 2 cloths is beyond me.

Quite a lot of defensive mumsnetters on this thread.
OPs touched a nerve!

All these people using flipping wet wipes!! Can't you just use one sponge and either a non-rinsing spray or a Cif type thing??

When I was a cleaner I went to one woman's house where there was dried and smeared poo all over the floors... not just in the bathroom but sitting room and hallway. The client was there and said as if it was no big deal, "Yes, I'm disabled and sometimes I don't make it to the toilet in time." She then gave me a garden hoe to scrape it up!! Another job I had involved unblocking a loo which was completely filled with rock-solid dried poo. I had to saw and chop at it with a kitchen knife. And you know what? I preferred those kind of jobs to cleaning houses where I was dusting immaculate un-dusty surfaces and polishing tables that already gleamed. At least it needed doing!

would it kill you to use a cloth and chuck it in the washing maching with the rest of a load?

Nope, but I CBA'd. I use fabric softener except for towel loads, so the cloths would sit there for a few days and I'd run out of them, not a matter of just chucking it in the washing machine

I buy these lovely lint free soft clothes in packs of two dozen each. They come in high vis yellow high vis green - so they don't get lost I suppose.

When I clean I make up a bowl of nice smelling cleaning liquid and hot water then wipe everything down. The cloths are thrown in the laundry hamper every few days and get washed with the next load. I never run out. Good lord, I can have 48 of them in circulation.

Using disposable wipes would be like using a thin paper towel surely?

I can’t imagine using wipes. They seem like a massive waste of money.

I did a few months cleaning with a cleaning firm a couple of years back between finishing my old job and starting my current job. Wipes and recycling would barely have featured on my radar. I'm pretty relaxed about cleaning my own home, we have 2 dogs who bring in mud and shed hair and I'm certainly not hoovering or washing the floor every day, but the difference between a bit of mess and absolute filth became very clear. In such a short space of time I hoovered maggots out of someone's living room carpet, along with all the old food the family simply dropped on the floor and didn't pick up when they were done with it. Cleaned a house where the dog wasn't really house trained and the owner simply dropped toilet roll over the poo and left it for us to clean up (we went once a week 🤮). People who frequently couldn't be arsed to flush their toilets. I used to go home and scrub myself down in the shower after some houses. Absolutely awful, and I don't care if I sound judgy, I used to feel really sorry for any children living in some of those houses, they were the absolute pits and that was with cleaners coming once a week or so, although there's only so much you can achieve in 2 hours in conditions like that.

Also the usual sex toy collections left lying around etc. That never really bothered me after the other stuff, though.

Err... those people who are proudly displaying their eco warrior status by saying they use micro fibre cloths, I have some bad news for you:

Every time you wash those cloths, microplastics come away from the material and then are flushed into the drainage system where they ultimately end up in the environment.

So not very eco.

How about we all just agree that we’re all doing the best we can but ultimately sometimes we can’t (due to time, money; whatever) reduce our ecological footprint down to perfect levels. And let’s stop with this holier-than-thou “Oh I cant believe you use wipes, how gauche!” Bullshit.

I used to clean for a living - not private homes, but military barracks and buildings on my DH’s base.
Majority of the blokes were actually pretty clean - corridors in the blocks were usually separated by rank and generally the older, higher rankers were cleaner and more courteous than the younger ones.
Communal kitchens on the lower rankers’ corridors were a health and safety hazard when I’d go in on a Monday morning Mountains or washing up piled in the sink, half their Saturday night Chinese smeared across the worktops, bins overflowing, milk turning into cottage cheese in the fridges. According to my employer’s policy, I wasn’t supposed to touch any of their “personal items” and just clean MOD property - ie the sinks, surfaces etc, so the washing up wasn’t my problem luckily.
The thing that used to get my goat the most was the bins! To exit the building, these guys would have to leave their room, walk past the communal kitchen, out of the main doors and past the enormous wheelie bins to get to their cars or anywhere else. Did they ever empty the bin on the way out on a Friday afternoon? Did they fuck
So I’d walk in on a Monday morning, nostrils blasted with a smell like someone had died in the kitchens, and occasionally in the summer, a sprinkling of maggots
In the end, one of the higher rankers came to find me to ask me something while I was doing one of the kitchens and even he was shocked by it. He meated out blanket punishments to the people on that corridor. I heard the bollocking they received: “DO YOU THINK ITS ACCEPTABLE FOR OUR PREGNANT CLEANER TO BE DEALING WITH ACTUAL PARASITES?!! AND I DONT JUST MEAN YOU LOT!!” Needless to say, bins were emptied on a Friday afternoon from then onwards.

The faster the bloody wipes are banned the better.

Best eco cloth is one of your old cotton t shirts cut up. Lasts for ages. No extra cost. Decomposes.

Cut up towels are good too. I still use the bidder baby towels the kids had. Cut into squares they're excellent. And free.

occasionally in the summer, a sprinkling of maggots

[puts down breakfast spoon]