Or ways to remove that accumulation fast?

Non-vacuum cleaner tips would be more actionable for me currently, but please do share your ways.

    • This is the truth. The pandemic really messed up my house because we stopped cleaning when people stopped coming over, and now it is so bad that we still don’t have people coming over. Add to that having a kid who doesn’t want to ever get rid of any of her old toys, and 2 parents trying hard to not let depression win… I don’t think we’ll ever have a clean house again.

  •  iii   ( @iii@mander.xyz ) 
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    263 months ago

    I have dust mite allergies. 2 most important changes I did were:

    (1) no carpets, no curtains, only tile floors.

    (2) and I love my robot vaccuum. They do 80% of the work, daily, whilst I’m away.

  • When I was with my ex: every saturday morning. It sucked, but the reward of both chilling on the sofa in the afterglow of a clean apartment was awesome. God I miss that.

    Now: rarely. If it begins to affect my mental health, I might pick up clothing off the floor. I don’t clean for myself, I clean for the happiness of others

  • As @xmunk said, cleaning needs to be embedded in other tasks. If you cannot figure out how to embed a given task then you can set it for a fixed schedule. For example, you say that you clean your desk or office on Saturday morning and you have a given set of steps you accomplish.

    Another trick I learned from corporate world is to delegate the tasks. It is more manageable to follow up on someone doing it for you than you actually doing it. This can be someone else living with you, or someone you can hire to do. For example, you can hire someone to clean the house every Sunday. This later option could be expensive.

    If you want to embed tasks and do it yourself, then you need to make them easy for you, for example, you can overstock cleaning products. Let’s say you have a kitchen microfiber towel that hangs nearby and a dedicated cleaning product at reach. You consider that a meal (launch or dinner) equals, fetching the ingredients, cooking, eating and cleaning dishes, putting away dishes, and finally cleaning them. If you don’t clean dishes then you consider you did not finish your dinner.

    Same thing for the bathroom, you need cleaning tools at reach when you are in the bathroom, don’t reuse kitchen stuff to clean the bathroom. Then when you shower, you clean the bathtub, the mirror, the sink, your underwear, wipe the floor, etc.

  • Robot vacuum cleaners aren’t great a cleaning, but they are very effective at keeping the dust down. You will still want to clean occasionally but with a robot vacuum running regularly you can do it much less often and the house feels cleaner in the meantime.

    I’m also lucky enough to be able to afford house cleaners now. It is such a nice gift to our family to not have to worry about doing these things. We can spend that time doing stuff together rather than cleaning and we don’t think about how dirty the house is and dread cleaning it nearly as often. If you can afford it I would highly recommend it. It definitely isn’t cheap but many people have more expensive habits that bring less joy IMHO.

    • I’ll second the robot vacuum. Doesn’t even have to be an expensive one or a “top reviewed” blah blah(don’t get a lemon though). It’s not a replacement for a vacuum or having to clean, it’s just a nice little companion that helps out a little and reminds you that you have to clean. Don’t have one myself but a relative does and it’s fun to see (over there a lot to help out because they’re older).

      If you’re into sci-fi or electronics or little animal/robot companions in games, it kinda feels exactly the same but in person. Such a strange sensation to feel joy when the little robot guy runs between your feet or you have to shoo them out of the bathroom so you can use it lol. Even my older relative kinda treats it like a pet but all you have to do is empty it’s belly.

  •  oxjox   ( @oxjox@lemmy.ml ) 
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    53 months ago

    I’m constantly cleaning. I live alone in a 100+ year old building. It’s no exaggeration to say that there’s a coating of dust moments after I get done dusting.

    I use a microfiber duster for daily cleaning and a heavily diluted mixture of water, vinegar, and soap for deeper cleaning.

    The only thing I can think of, but haven’t tried, to minimize dust accumulation is to run a humidifier. That should theoretically give the dust particles something to cling onto and be less prone to becoming airborne as you move about. Perhaps a daily water misting from a spray bottle could work - I should give that a try.

    I have an air purifier in my bedroom. It doesn’t do very much. I don’t really understand how they’re supposed to work anyway. There’s no way it’s going to suck in dust from the other side of the room. I wonder sometimes if it actually makes things worse. I use it mostly for the white noise to sleep with.

      •  oxjox   ( @oxjox@lemmy.ml ) 
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        13 months ago

        I have one that claims “Circulates the air 1x per hour in 743 square foot rooms and 4.8x per hour in 153 sq. ft rooms”. My room is 180 square feet (12x15).

        The concept itself doesn’t make sense to me. You’ve got a single box that both sucks in air and blows it out. It would seem to me that this just creates vortex around the box itself with some minimal air movement in the rest of the area.

        A proper air purification system would need to be part of your home’s central HVAC system where it’s been engineered to suck in the air from one side of a room, filter it through the system, then blow it back out on the other side of the room. And / or several smaller air purifiers strategically placed within a room.

        I’ve done a bit of searching and surprisingly have not been able to find a rally good study. This would seem easy enough to qualify with some knowledge of fluid mechanics. I found this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NinsW8f2ABk The room is about a third the size of my room and the purifier is about 50% larger. The in/out design of this device is dramatically different from mine. I have a hunch that the consumer (Amazon) air purifier market is mostly garbage.

        • You are correct the volume is how much air it can process and not a guarantee it will do your actual space. You definitely will get overly air cycled areas and deadzones. You may find more dust settles in certain areas now. Without ducting, one thing you could try it setting up an ossicilating fan elsewhere to try to randomly kick more air into the flow of things. By doing this it will get more dust into the air at first until it can be drawn into a filter.

  • I walk around the house with a swiffer mop before I take a shower. Then vaccum the carpets in the rooms once a week. Showering is usually the trigger to do some sort of maintenance cleaning in the house. My logic is that if I’m gonna get dirty, I’ll do it before I shower.

  • I used to have a very large air filter standing in the corner of my room. It wouldn’t eliminate the need to vacuum, but it would reduce the dust in the air and make it less noticeable. I got rid of it because the filter cartridges were sorta discontinued/really expensive

  • If we’re strictly talking dust accumulation, there’s a few things you can do to reduce this.

    • Make sure to change the filter in your HVAC system and intake vents every few months with a high quality filter. The better the filter, the more you need to change it.
    • You can also add an air filter to individual rooms. I added them to all our bedrooms and it helps a ton with keeping dust down.

    Aside from that, you’ll still need to dust every so often and how often will depend on how fast it gets dirty again and how deep you want to clean. I use a vacuum and damp rag to dust shelves and such every month and I dust other things like blinds and fan blades and pull out furniture and appliances once a year. Every few years we’ll need to remove something that usually never moves and we’ll clean up the dust from that. I will say it’s much easier to clean stuff regularly when you don’t have lots of things laying around or taking up space. Keeping literal objects tidy makes it less of a chore. It’s a lot easier to just wipe a table than to wipe a table and all the knick knacks.

  • So many things factor into this…

    Our house became significantly (like 97%) less dusty when our dog passed.

    The age of your house

    The type of furnace filter

    Routine

    We have 3 small kids, so we try to tidy up physical stuff (toys, clothes, bags, etc) every day. Dishes too.

    Once a week is wiping down nin-kitchen surfaces

    Once a month is wiping down baseboards and door trim