Why your kitchen looks and feels dirty after cleaning

If you’ve wiped the bench, stove top and cupboard doors and the kitchen still doesn’t look clean, it’s either because you’re using the wrong product or not using the right one correctly.

Degreasers are a must-have in the kitchen as they can do what multipurpose cleaners can’t; break down and remove the grease and grime that’s splattered around the room from cooking and food preparation.

“If I was to use a multipurpose spray, it would be time-consuming, and I don’t think it would break through the grease and grime,”  Cherie Polwarth, professional cleaner from Maid2Match, told nine.com.au.

“When you use a multipurpose cleaner you can still feel the grease is there, whereas with a degreaser you can just feel it’s clean once you rinse it and dry it off.”

You’ll know a surface is dirty from grease when it looks discoloured and dull and feels sticky. It can also be the cause of lingering kitchen odours.

“The stickier it is, the more you know you’re going to scrub it,” Polwarth said.

For a stove top that hasn’t been cleaned between uses, you might need to let your degreaser sit for a bit before wiping it off. But that’s not the case for all surfaces.

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“If you let it sit on cupboards and rangehoods, it’ll run, and it will leave run marks even after you’ve cleaned it. It will look amazing just as you clean it, but you’ll walk away and come back, and you’ll go ‘Oh, what are those lines?’,” she said.

“So I have found that soaking on a stove top is great, but spraying and immediately wiping cupboards and rangehoods allows that degreaser to really work, and just drying them off completely as soon as you’ve sprayed and wiped them.”

When cleaning kitchen cupboards, Polwarth only does two at a time so she can wipe them with the degreaser and dry them before the product starts to run.

“The secret to your cupboards is a good degreaser and a dry cloth. Never use a moist cloth because a lot of people will have dark-coloured cupboards and what I found when I went to homes to do quality checks was there would always be little water bubbles… and that is what happens when you use a wet cloth with your degreaser on a kitchen cupboard,” she said.

One place it isn’t recommended to use degreasers on is walls, even though grease can end up there from splatters during cooking. Polwarth will try a multipurpose cleaner on greasy walls first and if that’s not doing the job she’ll swap to sugar soap.

However, degreaser can be used for spot cleaning if you do it right.

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“Every now and then [you can use] a little bit of degreaser on a cloth just to quickly get that little bit of grease off the wall, but then drying it down as fast as you can because you don’t want it to go into the plaster [because it’s porous],” she said.

Regularly cleaning rangehood filters helps prevent kitchen walls and even light fixtures from being coated in grease from cooking. A dirty rangehood filter is unable to collect airborne grease leaving it to settle on other surfaces.

“Grease can surprisingly spread pretty far if it’s not contained by a clean rangehood,” Kate Croukamp, professional cleaner and co-owner of Clean Like a Pro, told nine.com.au.

“I’ve seen it affect areas well beyond the stove; it gets onto pendant lights, blinds, fans, and can even start coating furniture and other items in adjacent rooms if left unchecked. It’s pretty sneaky.”