Winter Cleaning Tips

Winter is here and with it comes a different set of cleaning needs. Days are shorter and darker, which means winter cleaning’s goal is to insure not only cleanliness, but brightness and healthy indoor air quality. It is easy to overlook some spots, even when you are striving to thoroughly clean your home week in and week out. The Signature Maids have developed these winter cleaning tips to help you keep your home at its cleanest over the winter season.

Maintaining Healthy Indoor Air Quality in the Winter

Healthy indoor air quality is important all year, but especially in winter, when allergens, viruses, and other germs often get trapped inside and thrive in cooler temperatures. This can be detrimental to the health of those inside, especially those with allergies and asthma, as well as those more susceptible like the very young and the elderly.

Here are some tips for maintaining healthy indoor air quality in winter. First, check your HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) filters and vents. These filters and vents are often overlooked because they are out of sight and not easily reached. You should replace or clean your filters regularly, but you’ll want to call on your HVAC professional to do annual maintenance and clean your vents, if needed. Winter is a great time to call on your HVAC pro as they face lulls in winter between emergency calls.

Winter is also one of the times you should clean your dryer lint vents. Dryer lint is a fire hazard and the vent tube often goes unattended. If it is caked with lint, you should replace it rather than attempting to clean it. While you are back there, this is a good time to unplug your dryer, remove the back and vacuum away the lint there as well.

And while you are a work cleaning filters and vents, this is the perfect time to replace your refrigerator water and air filters. You can also unplug the refrigerator, pull it out, and vacuum the dust beneath it and on the cooling coils.

Checking the Fireplace, Wood Stove, or Chimney

Ensuring your fireplace, wood stove, or chimney are clean and operating properly will help maintain air quality while greatly decreasing your changes of a fire. Your fireplace flues and furnace flues should be checked regularly for cracks. Call on your chimney professional to check for cracks which may lead to carbon monoxide poisoning. While it’s on your mind, this is a good time to test batteries in smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, and replace batteries or detectors as needed.

Winter Cleaning Around the House

With shorter days, winter is the time to enhance brightness in your home. You can do so by giving a little extra attention to your lamps and light fixtures. Clean lamp shades, light fixtures, sconces, and ceiling fan lighting, riding them of dust and bugs, and allowing your lights to shine brighter.

While you’re working on bringing more light in your home this winter, washing walls and windows allows more light in and helps reflect it too. If you don’t want to tackle this big, often messy job, the professionals at Signature Maids can get the job done well for you.

In the bedroom, clean away the dust bunnies beneath the bed and on the bed frame. This means removing mattresses and box springs. Once clean, rotate and flip mattresses, and launder mattress covers, dust covers, and bed linens.

Since you’re focused on linens for the moment, now is a great time to look underneath the cushions of your upholstered furniture. Remove them, and use your vacuum’s crevice tool to clean all those hard to reach places where dust, crumbs, and ‘lost’ items gather.

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