We’ve talked about how often you should be showering, where ketchup actually belongs (in the fridge, FYI) and whether we’re all swallowing spiders in our sleep.
And now we’re tackling the age-old question of: how often should you be vacuuming your home?
As you can imagine, there are many opinions. When someone pitched the question to the masses on Reddit, most people seemed to think once a week was reasonable – although pet owners were cleaning their floors a lot more (while some did it daily, others suggested two or three times a week).
What do the experts think?
There are a few factors that seem to influence how often people should be vacuuming their floors.
Pets are a big one as they often leave dander and dirt lying around (I feel like I am constantly battling against muddy cat paw prints across my clean kitchen floor).
Likewise, if you’ve got young children – particularly crawling babies – you’ll probably want to be cleaning a bit more so they’re not picking up old bits of food or dirt and putting them in their mouths.
If you’re sensitive to dust or struggle with hay fever, you might also want to be cleaning more regularly to keep pesky allergy symptoms at bay.
“Although there is no hard and fast rule of how often you should hoover, frequent vacuuming is key to maintaining a healthy living environment free of dirt, dust and other allergens,” say the cleaning pros at Hoover.
“Frequent vacuuming prevents dirt and dust getting trapped and trodden into your floors which is especially important for households with pets or children crawling and spending more time on the floor.”
They recommend vacuuming rooms with more foot traffic – like the hallway, kitchen and living room – at least twice a week.
But other rooms like bedrooms and studies could be done once a week.
Karen Maguire, founder of CleanerMatch, agrees. She told NBC News that high-traffic areas might require vacuuming every few days, whereas low-traffic areas could go a week or two.
For pet owners, experts at Hoover suggest vacuuming twice a week – although they do caveat that lots of owners will probably want to do it daily to get rid of fur and dirt.
As one Redditor explained: ”[I vacuum] Daily if I can. I have 3 pets, one of whom is incredibly fluffy, and I hate seeing the pet hair tumbleweeds bopping about everywhere.”
The other key consideration is the time of year. Maguire advised people to vacuum more often in autumn and spring “when doors are open and dirt gets tracked inside”, whereas in the winter you can probably get away with a weekly hoover spree.
