How to clean your refrigerator

20 May 2016
 Categories: Industrial & Manufacturing, Blog

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It's very important that your refrigerator is kept clean. An unclean refrigerator can cause bacteria growth, which can affect you and your family as you're eating the food from the refrigerator. It's also important that the refrigerator is getting cleaned regularly, as the moist environment in the refrigerator causes bacteria to build up quite fast. To avoid harmful bacteria and nasty odours from forming in your refrigerator, there are a few things you should think about when you are cleaning it.

Washing shelves and drawers

The first thing you should do after emptying the refrigerator of groceries and turning it off is to remove the shelves and drawers. Fill up a large tub with hot water and ordinary dish soap and submerge the shelves and drawers entirely. Scrub them gently with a cloth or sponge while they are under water. Remember to rinse them thoroughly with clean, cold water afterwards. You also need to let them dry completely before putting them back into the refrigerator. If you use hot water to rinse them, they might still be warm when they are put into the refrigerator, which can harm its cooling process. Drying them is important as added moisture inside the refrigerator can encourage further bacteria growth.

Wiping the interior

When your shelves and drawers are drying, you need to take care of the rest of the refrigerator. You can use an ordinary kitchen cleaning product to get grease and spillage off the walls of the refrigerator, but you do need to rinse it thoroughly afterwards, as you don't want chemicals to get into your food. You could also use a mixture of baking soda and water than you use to moisten a clean cloth. This is not harmful to you even if you were to digest some of it as you're eating the food from the fridge later. If you find any extra tough spots that are hard to get off, you could use a little bit of toothpaste. This is slightly abrasive, which makes the dirt come off easier, but not abrasive enough to damage the interior of your refrigerator.

Cleaning the food

After you've put the shelves back in and cleaned the interior of the fridge, you should turn it on again. Let it cool down for a little bit before putting the food back in. While you're waiting for the refrigerator to cool off, you could get a clean, damp cloth and wipe off jars and boxes that are going back into the refrigerator to make sure that no dirt or bacteria gets reintroduced to the refrigerator as you're putting the food back.