One of the keys to proper home maintenance is keeping your home clean. Dirt, moisture, mold, mildew, and bacteria can build up quickly on many of your home’s surfaces, and all can cause costly damage over time. But cleaning can also cause damage when done improperly, so today we’ll take a look at some good cleaning techniques that will help extend the life of your home’s surfaces and systems.

Our top pick for home cleaning is also our simplest: buy a multi-purpose steam cleaner. Steam cleaners accomplish several goals at once: they clean as well or better than traditional methods, they save you money on cleaning supplies, and they reduce your family’s chemical exposure all in one shot. The key with steam cleaners is to find one that heats the water to well over a 212° Fahrenheit boiling point. Steamers that heat to lower temperatures may appear to be cleaning your home, but they’re not doing the job of disinfecting because they’re not able to kill bacteria, viruses, and other unhealthy germs. The ability to clean well and disinfect (without chemicals) is one of the best elements of steam cleaning, so this is a very important feature to look at when researching home steamers. We’re particularly fond of the Haan Multi-Purpose Steam Cleaner because it is affordable, lightweight, easy to use, and really effective.

Where Do I Use A Steamer?
People often think of floors and upholstery when they think of steam cleaners, and it’s true that steam cleaners do a good job in these high-traffic areas. But today’s steamers go well beyond the sofa cushions. A good home steam cleaner can be used, with various attachments, to clean all bathroom surfaces including tile, glass, and mirrors all without the harsh abrasives and chemicals that eat away at your tile and grout over time. It can also be very effective on hardwood floors. For those with small children, especially crawlers, steaming the floors not only gets them much cleaner than using a traditional mop and bucket, it disinfects your floors without leaving latent chemicals that your children would otherwise ingest through crawling and then putting their toys and hands into their mouths.

Steam cleaners can also be put to good use in the kitchen, where they’re great for eliminating stuck-on food and grease on the stove, in the oven, and even in the dishwasher along the sealing edge of the door. Not only will the steamer remove the grimy buildup that accumulates at the dishwasher’s edge, but it will also disinfect this area to help keep your dishwasher free of odor-causing bacteria. On your work surfaces, a steam cleaner can kill illness-causing germs, again without leaving harmful chemicals behind.

Lightweight steamers come in handy for disinfecting doorknobs, drawer handles, and other commonly touched surfaces that harbor bacteria. All those places you typically use anti-bac wipes or Lysol when someone in the house is sick? If it’s not electrical, you can usually use the steamer. Steamers are also helpful in cleaning mattresses, carpets, and some draperies.

Finally, many steam cleaners work well outdoors where you can use them to rid patio furniture of mold and hard water stains from rain. Not as effective as a power or pressure washer for harder jobs, these handy devices do work well for cleaning lower-level exterior windows and outdoor light fixtures. They even keep algae at bay around pools and are great for zapping weeds that crop up between patio pavers. Some outdoor-specific steamers can even stand up to tough outdoor use such as cleaning pavers and stepping-stones.

How Does It Save Me Money?
Using a steam cleaner may seem like an expenditure at first because buying a decent one will cost an average of $120-$200 and up. However, over the course of just a few months, that cost is offset by the reduction in chemicals and other cleaning products. Plus, with reusable pads you can simply toss in the washing machine, most steamers don’t need to have their cleaning pads replaced often at all.

A clean home is a healthy home. And it’s a home that will stay in better shape for a longer time, requiring fewer repairs. All together, that makes for happy homeowners, and that’s what we like.