The big cleaning mistake that means your kitchen bench isn't actually disinfected

A professional cleaner has revealed the exact steps we need to take to properly clean our kitchen benches, and clearly a lot of us are cleaning them wrong.

Gabby from Kings Cleaning Co explained the process of disinfecting a surface in a TikTok video.

It turns out that just spraying and wiping the cleaning product isn't all we need to do to kill the germs lurking on the bench.

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Firstly, the Sydney cleaner advises cleaning the bench first with warm soapy water before you use your disinfectant spray.

"This removes dirt and debris, which can harbor bacteria," she explained in the caption.

Then we can spray a cleaner that has disinfectant written on the packaging and this is where you might be making another cleaning mistake.

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"To disinfect the surface you need to leave it for 10 minutes or whatever the bottle says," she says.

Once the time is up then we can then wipe the disinfectant off with a damp cloth using what Gabby calls an 'S' motion from one end of the bench to the other.

But it's not just the kitchen bench this cleaning process should be used for.

"Yes, apply this method to your toilet, your shower, your bedside tables, your sink area – that is how you disinfect a surface. Clean it, saturate it with disinfectant, leave it for 10 minutes or whatever the bottle says and then wipe it dry," she said.

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Cleaning a surface before using disinfectant serves a very important purpose in making the disinfectant effective.

"For a germicide to work, it has to touch the germs. If you have a layer of grime, the dirt can protect the bacteria. Cleaning has to precede disinfection," Dr. David Weber, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of North Carolina, told The New York Times.

As for letting a disinfectant sit or 'dwell' before wiping it off, the amount of time listed on the packaging is the time the product needs to kill germs. The disinfectant must remain wet for this entire length of time to be effective, so you can respray if the product has dried before the time is up.

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