Why It’s Super Important to Disinfect Floor Surfaces

Our Home’s Best Kept Secret

The verdict is in, and it seems we’ve all been tricked by something near and dear to us. That’s right folks, our home floors have been deceiving us all for a long time now. Whether or not your floors are dear to you is debatable, but we all find ourselves near the floors in our home on a daily basis.

Although most of us follow the 3 or 5 second rule religiously at home, expecting the bacteria to respect our time limits as well, in public places we wouldn’t even consider eating something that falls on the floor.

Here’s the real issue: What makes our home floors any safer than those in public places?

It’s no secret that many of us like to have a clean home.

We break our backs picking up various people’s things from the living room and we slave over the vacuum cleaner in order to keep the family and pet hair from creating its own city. Unfortunately, while we may be tackling the messiness of our homes, we are missing the element of sanitation. This is a grave mistake due to the infectious and disgusting nature of a lot of the bacteria living on surfaces like our floors every day.

Here are some helpful points about sanitizing your home:

How Floors Get Bacteria in The First Place

Firstly, there’s the issue of how our conniving little bacteria friends got into the house uninvited.

This is unfortunately hard to avoid, as bacteria from all the places we visit will follow us home on our shoes, clothes, bags, pets, and anything else we take around with us.

Believe it or not, your shoes carry so many different types of bacteria around that you might start to think you are running a bacteria hotel!

Our beloved pets also tend to track in a lot of unwanted guests simply because their fur provides an excellent surface with which to hold bacteria and carry it into the house.

Why It’s Such a Risk to Keep it Around

Doctors have been warning us for years about the harmful effects of some bacteria, giving us tips such as to wash our hands frequently and avoid putting them in our around our mouth as much as possible. This is great advice when it’s followed, but how many of us are dedicated enough to fighting infections that we will wash our hands every time we pick something up from the floor or touch the floor at all?

The chances are even slimmer that we will enforce that advice on others in our household such as our children, young and old.

Small children tend to be the most at risk of exposure to disease-causing bacteria because they spend so much time on the floors and they tend to put anything and everything in their mouths if left unsupervised for 2 seconds.

Some of the bacteria that can be found on our home’s floors may be surprising. On the list of shockers is the likely presence of small amounts of E Coli, among many other species of disease-causing micro-critters.

What to do About it

Now that we’ve gotten the shocking stuff out of the way, let’s all be reassured that this bacteria build-up is fairly easy to combat with some simple sanitation measures.

Since prevention is better than treatment, some research suggests that leaving shoes by the door, rather than wearing them around the house, can help to keep bacteria outside where it belongs.

Once it comes inside we can fight it by adding mopping to our daily list of chores, being sure to change the mop head every three months at most so that we don’t end up just pushing the dirt and bacteria around to another area.

Vacuuming the carpets (especially with a steam vacuum) is a great thing to do regularly, but don’t neglect to wash the carpets as well with a disinfectant carpet cleaner in order to properly disinfect floor surfaces and not just clean them. If you have small children, you may consider putting down blankets on the floor for them and washing off the items they are likely to put into their mouths.

Last but not least, while the 3 second rule is found to have some merit it is by no means a reliable safeguard against bacteria! Make sure you keep your home clean AND sanitary so that you, your family, and your guests can spend your time at home healthy and happy.