Hygienic home - how often, realistically, should I be cleaning?

[teacher1984]

Any suggestions/advice about how often, realistically, I should be cleaning bathrooms, floors, sinks etc to keep a hygienic home, especially this time of year? Should I be using bleach/disinfectants rather than natural products?

My child gets higher than average number of tummy bugs each year and I'm wondering if I could be at fault.

I have taught her good hand washing practice.

I followed the fly lady when I was on maternity leave.

I clean the toilet and the sink area once a day. It takes a minute. The kitchen floor is mopped whenever it looks dirty. Probably every day or two. I just use a multipurpose cleaner, never any anti-bac. Whatever is cheapest in the supermarket basically!

Now I'm back at work full time. We have a cleaner once a week. And DH does the toilet + sink once a week. And I mop the kitchen floor once a week. So they get cleaned twice a week.

The rest of the house is just once a week, if it's not clear in my post.

I think you're either prone to tummy bugs or you're not. She won;t be catching them at home, will she, but at school/nursery?

We do lots of hand washing, but don;t go mad cleaning. I like clean bathrooms and kitchen, but am not a fan of hoovering or dusting...

Do you get your dc to close the toilet lid before flushing? Apparently this minimizes germy blow back from the loo...

elQuintoConyo, I so admire you for using natural cleaning products. I really want to go that way but something is stopping me. I don't know what. I mean, we don't do too badly - I don't use bleach, antibac sprays or wet wipes. Most of the time, I use a sink full of hot water and washing up liquid to clean pretty much anything except the loo, which gets loo cleaver not bleach. I would like to switch to mire natural products though. Maybe I just need to take the plunge and do it :/

Smallgreenbouncyball - 3 and pre-school yes. We are currently investigating food intolerances as understand that would weaken the immune system.

Savagebeauty - wow - you are truly blessed. I myself very rarely suffer from them - perhaps only 5 or 6that I can remember in 30 years.

DC on the other hand - approx 15 in 3 ye

Posted too soon...3 years

Most allergies in children are apparently due to people making their homes too clean. Allergies were virtually unknown when I was a child and I didn't know any with asthma. Kids that grow up on farms and with animals have far fewer illnesses etc than children raised in cities. The immune system latches onto anything as they never build up a resistance to bacteria etc. Normal hand washing with soap should be sufficient - not all this disenfecting surfaces and bleaching everything!

rabbit washing up liquid (i.e. soap) and water is pretty eco friendly.

I never use bleach, hate it. Why dye things white??

I do clean tho, but I tend to use hot soapy water more than anything. Clean bathrooms twice a week, kitchen sink daily, steam mop k floor every other day, thorough clean of kitchen (doors, hob, bin) once a week.

Hoover downstairs daily but that's not about hygiene as much as not liking the grot build up. I think we may be v messy as a family.

No one is ever ill here - DS2 had a morning off school this week (tummy bug as it goes) for the first time in his school career and he is in yr 8.

Not a fan of anti-bac stuff myself but yy to handwashing.

OP - do you give your DD vitamin D every day between october and march? We're very vit d deprived in the uk in the winter which is crap for immunity. Has she had courses of antibiotics? Can wipe out helpful gut bacteria. Optibac is good for little ones.

Itritablebitch - thanks for the suggestions...she's only ever had one course of antibiotics and we've done long periods of Optibac off and on during and since.

I'm not consistent with giving her vit d and know I need to so will really get onto that, thanks - I definitely know she needs it as there have been so many days this year we've barely left the house due to rain so she's really not seen much sunlight! I think another run of Optibac would be good right now too.

I find your question interesting because for years our family has picked up every bug going, colds, coughs, d&v... if it's going around we all had it. Most winters we would all be very regularly ill from September through to April! This year I was expecting it to be worse as we've moved, so I thought we'd be in a different germ pool and have maybe even less resistance, but I think we've had one or two colds, not very badly, and a mild tummy bug. I'm wondering why this year has been so different. It could just be the milder weather, or the lower exposure to germs as I've been stuck at home with knee injuries, although various family members have been out and about so I would assume they were being exposed to bugs. We had a period of 3-4 months before Christmas where we ate no sugar at all, and have had a good few months of cooking almost every meal from scratch. We get through a lot of fresh veg and fruit every week. After reading up on gut bacteria and the human microbiome, I switched from liquid soaps to bar soaps and shampoo bars, and stopped washing so often. We have 3 cats this year. I have bought quite a few peace lillies and spread them through the house as they remove lots of chemicals from the air. We've been a bit better at taking vitamin D recently. I worked out I have a very hard time digesting gluten, lactose, eggs, oats, most grains, and coffee, so have removed all of those from my diet. The rest of the family have switched sugary cereals for scrambled organic eggs for breakfast. I've started buying smaller amounts of high quality grass fed organic meat, instead of eating supermarket meat, eating more fish and seafood. So in essence, we've had a higher nutrient, lower refined carb and sugar, hopefully higher quality diet. We also spent lots of time allotment gardening last summer. In theory this would have improved our vitamin d stores for winter and increased our healthy bacteria by exposing us to soil regularly, and the massive crops of fresh organic runner beans eaten straight from the vine and raspberries and blackberries should have benefitted us too. We also ate a lot of french raw unpasteurised cheese this year. So it's hard to pin down one thing that has kept us healthier this winter! I recommend watching Rob Knight's TED talk on the human microbiome, and reading Tim Spector's book 'The Diet Myth'. Whatever it was that has helped us though, it was definitely not more cleaning, or bleach, which we only use in the loo! Our kitchen sides are rarely very clean these days, the floors are visibly in need of cleaning more often than not, and if I clean the bathroom once a week I feel quite proud, so I can absolutely rule out cleaning as a path to a more resilient immune system HTH

Has anyone here tried the Ecover products? There was a similar thread on MN not too long ago and someone was advocating using Ecover products. I was at Sainsburys the other day and almost picked up the Ecover loo cleaner but noticed it said nothing about killing germs on the bottle. Don't know about anyone else but kitchen surfaces and toilets i like to know that i'm killing germs so i got some bleach instead. Otherwise i would like to change to Ecover.

ecover is great.

thing is you don't want to kill all germs in the home, just reduce them to a lower level. we need the harmless (for us) bacteria to keep the harmful in check.

unless you live with someone who is immuno suppressed or someone has a serious infectious disease (noro, flu, parasites...) there is no need.

I agree about the theory of sterile homes not being good because it creates weak imune systems but i think toilets and kitchen surfaces are where germs need to be killed.

At risk of being repetitive celeste83, I don't use any bleach or antibacterial products to clean my house and we are generally a healthy bunch. My children might have one or two days off school per year - usually with a cold or throat infection, rather than stomach bugs.

I use ordinary pine toilet cleaner in the loo, clean kitchen surfaces with hot water and washing up liquid or ecover multi purpose spray. I take care when have been handling raw meat or fish and we all wash hands frequently.

I like ecover products, although sadly haven't had good results with their dishwasher tablets.

Irritablebitch - really interesting, thank you.

We are a family actually following a very similar path diet wise - grass fed meets, organic, wild salmon, lots of fruit & veg etc. I haven't been ill at all for a good couple of years even though I've been pregnant for 9 months of that where your immune system is suppressed. Hubby the same. It's just DC1 who continues to suffer - although very few colds or other illnesses...its just the tummy bugs picked up without fail.

I don't know what to make of it but perhaps I have to keep working on boosting her immune with diet, vit d, probiotics whilst accepting she perhaps has a weakness which we may never pinpoint.

When my children were small and at nursery (and more prone to stomach things) I did used to make sure they at lots of live organic yogurt, like Rachel's or Yeo Valley. And would boost them up with those specialist yogurt drinks as an extra in the noro season or if there was something nasty doing the rounds. Perhaps you could have your dd's gut flora tested privately?

Not read the full thread, so sorry if repeating. You mentioned your hand washing was good, but not sure about husband's. If his is poor, he could be spreading bug around. Tactfully make sure he knows it.

She may have a particular food intolerance. She may also have a blood group that is particularly appealing to Norovirus, sadly. Apparently blood type can be a determining factor in who gets tummy bugs badly and who doesn't.

Why are people obsessed with bleach? The one thing I am a bit OCD about is my loo - but I rarely use bleach as it will corrode the surface so that limescale takes a hold. It is also very bad to inhale the fumes. We also need bacteria around to keep the immune system in check. My brother just dumps bleach down his loo - the surface of the pan is rough and it's a grey colour. My loo looks the same as when it was new. I only use a tiny bit of bleach about once in two months and to leave in the loo when I go on holiday? I use a few drops of floor cleaner once a day - scrub round with a washing-up type brush (loo brushes far too big) and once a week I put a latex glove on, bale the water out with a plastic cup and use the w/u brush and de-scaler. The pan is always sparkling. I just use a surface cleaner on the seat/back etc. There is a lot of bunk about hand washing after using loos. Urine is sterile, unless you have an infection and by flashing one's hands under the tap for a second (as I see people do in shop loos) you will be picking up more germs than you had already! I'm a retired qualified Dental Nurse - hand washing has to be done properly, as in the medical profession - otherwise it's pointless. A doctor talking on the radio a while back said men should wash their hands BEFORE going to the loo as they are more likely to transfer germs to themselves from day to day living than handling their body parts! People say they have 'touched door handles etc' in public loos - do you wash your hands after touching every door handle you use ? ! Sorry this post is a bit long!