Your best mop?

[sojo44]

I need a new mop for the downstairs to really give those floors a good clean and feed into my OCD.

What is your favourite mop system to really get the job done efficiently?

I love my Vileda spray mop - it's quick and easy and always ready to mop up any spills that happen

If you really need to clean a lot, then a steam mop is the thing. Any cheap one as the heat of the steam is a red herring actually-- the thing to spend money on is the microfibre heads: buy a dozen and use a new cloth every time you mop. Coral heads and animal heads are good (look on eBay).

I'm not a fan of cleaning personally but I had to keep an absurdly clean house for 20 years for medical reasons (no longer) so I really REALLY learnt about cleaning and infection control. The key to clean floors is fast drying, and mechanical removal, so a steam mop and then boil washing the mop head (get a little nappy pail) is the most cleaning for the least effort.

Most steam mops advertise and price based on the heat of their steam but in order to sanitise a surface you need to hold it for over 10 minutes at over 60 degrees, so, no one is mopping their floor like that. It would take weeks to do a floor of a house. It's nonsense. You just need it hot so the surface moisture evaporates quickly, as a warm wet surface is very hospitable to bacteria. You want to pick up that bacteria with the mop head and then boil them to death in the washing machine.

Any mop where you're reusing the same head over and over is just swabbing bacteria and dirt into the petri dish it has just made of your floors. If you don't actually need to clean effectively (and most people really don't - it's healthier to live with friendly bacteria), then that is actually totally fine!

Not a traditional mop but I absolutely love my shark steam mop. I’ve had other brand steam mops in the past (vax etc) which were rubbish and I’d always go back to a mop and bucket but I bought a shark steam mop over a year ago and haven’t looked back and even got rid of my kitchen mop and bucket as I never had to use it anymore!!

Another vote for vileda spray mop, quick and easy. Bloody love it.