Does General Cleaning Make You Healthy?
Whenever the year-end or Christmas season comes, the general cleaning is around wherever you go. General cleaning is one of hardest thing to comply. Among the hardest parts to clean are the kitchen scuttle and stubbornness of sticky oiled wall and sink.
But what's the relation between general cleaning and health?
Let's enter from a simple cleaning technique. What do you use to remove oily scribbles on kitchen utensils? We recommend using tangerine (orange peel) for this type of cleaning. The citrus fruit have essential oils called limonene, commonly used on detergents to easily dissolve dirt and oil.
How about water heater or jar (pot)? Do you notice white scales appearing inside the pot? Tap water contains calcium, causing alkaline scales around. Now, you can remove it easily with vinegar. Mix one tablespoon of vinegar for every one liter of water and boil. After boiling, keep it overnight. The next morning, you will notice that all white scales have fallen.
How about windows, glasses, cups and ceramics? Good cleaning materials are just around your kitchen. It's potato peel. Potato's skin contains chemical substance called saponin. This substance is extracted from plants that form a soapy lather when mixed with water and are also used to make detergents.
Look at your stove, oven, and all those kitchen utensils. How long did you keep them just as is? For 3 months, 6 months, or even a year, without them being cleaned at all, didn't you? These items might be full of oil soiling, and they are all hard to remove or scrape down. Many of you maybe tried with normal detergents rubbing with spatula metal steel, sponge, and sodium bicarbonate. And your effort ended with marks of scratch around. Don't you know that many kinds of bacteria are living in these dirty areas, and are the contact places of the daily food you cook and eat?
Here's a simple way to remove sticky and hard oily dirt from such kitchen equipments. You can use any powdered-form detergents, probably sodium bicarbonate mixed with water. After wetting the kitchen tools with detergent, cover it with tissue paper or newspaper. If you use newspapers, be sure it is little wet, too. Use a hair dryer to heat the tissue paper to about 80 °C (176 °F) for 3 minutes. Amazingly, the sticky oil soiling is peeled off by itself.
Next is one of the unhealthiest places in your kitchen. Do you believe it is within your refrigerator? Most people think that no bacteria live inside refrigerator. As you look inside the refrigerator, appearances are fine and look well-cleaned.
Most refrigerators are divided into refrigeration room, freezing room and vegetable room. And we found bacteria in the vegetable room mostly, and freezing room and lastly in refrigeration room. We recommend placing vegetables in polybag or wrapping materials. In the freezing room, blood of meat and fish are leaking from polybag or its wrapping materials. Most bacteria do not die in the freezing room. Simplest way to clean the rooms is to wipe it with ethanol. The ethyl alcohol will kill almost 90 percent of bacteria in few seconds. Take note that bacteria do not die inside the refrigerator.
Finally, cleaning your room especially floor covering like carpets. There are full of lice and other unseen bacteria. How to wipe them out? Louse is a nocturnal insect (active at night). For this reason, you cannot clean the carpet and others with a vacuum cleaner as you do usually.
First, during the night, make sure to close all windows and make the room being cleaned as dark as possible. Since they are nocturnal insects, lice will come out to the surface of the carpet. It may take about 5-6 hours for all lice to come out. Therefore, we recommend you to clean early in the morning using a vacuum cleaner.
Now, you will stay healthy and live longer.
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