During this pandemic of COVID-19, Pro Clean has received many questions about disinfectants and sanitation, both for personal home use and commercially.
Many of our commercial clients, especially those with “brick & mortar” facilities, will require our electrostatic disinfectant applications and manual disinfectant hand wiping services throughout their properties. However, Pro Clean understands that many of our residential clients will, mostly likely, handle their own cleaning during this time. Therefore, we would like to address a few important points, regarding proper sanitizing, when using disinfectants.
All cleaning products have specific instructions labeled on their containers, to perform as advertised. This seems obvious, right? Why am I telling you about the label of a product that you’ve probably used 100 times? Because the instructions listed on the specific product are crucial to its performance.
Most disinfectants, even your typical over-the-counter products, such as Lysol, require a 3 second “dwell time” to be effective in sanitizing. The same product requires a 10 second “dwell time” to disinfect. If a person is attempting to do their best to rid their home of COVID19, or most other viruses, the goal should be to disinfect, over sanitation. Lastly, this product may require 3 minutes to kill mold, effectively. In the case of mold, removal of the inactive or “dead” spores is still necessary, after using a disinfectant, but I’ll save that for another blog.
What is “dwell time”? This means the product needs to remain wet, for the entire period of 10 seconds for disinfecting. Understanding this, you may come to the conclusion that you have been under-treating the areas you are attempting to rid of germs. You should be fully covering these areas with a mist of product, or fully saturating the areas, to be fully disinfecting, before allowing the sufficient dwell time.
The CDC has put out a full list of recommended products for the treatment and cleaning of Coronavirus. Click here to view list.
If your cleaning needs are beyond what you and/or your staff is prepared to handle, you can always reach out to us with questions by phone (636) 233-6825 or request an estimate to clean and treat your property.
Stay safe out there.