Are your disinfectants actually working? Are you disinfecting your home, car, and office every day? Do you know if you are using the disinfectant properly to eliminate viruses?
In order for a disinfectant to kill certain viruses (AKA Covid-19), you cannot just spray it on and wipe it off right away within seconds. This is not how disinfecting works.
Why? Well, there is something called “Dwell Time”.
Dwell Time is the amount of time that a disinfectant must be in contact with the surface, and REMAIN WET, in order to achieve the product’s full benefit of killing off the virus. Your average dwell time (or as we like to call it, “kill time” to kill the virus) is 10 minutes. So, what does this mean exactly?
If you are using a disinfectant with your typical 10 minute dwell time, you have to spray the surface you are wanting to disinfect and leave it WET for 10 minutes before touching it. 10 minutes is a LONG time to stand there and wait! It is also a long time to ensure the surface did not dry on its own. If the surface dries by itself in under 10 minutes, it did not kill the virus and the harmful virus is still lurking!
What can you do about it?
The good news is, there are other alternatives to the 10 minutes. There are a lot of options for products that have shorter dwell times. Some of them are as short as thirty seconds, one minute, three minutes, and even five minutes. Of course, the shorter the amount of dwell time, usually the more expensive the product is. It can be difficult to find the dwell time, a lot of the times there is no information on the actual product itself. At Red Door Cleaning we have done our research and have called many many disinfecting companies that don’t have the information on their product. All of them were 10 minutes.
Products like Microban all have a 10 minute dwell time. So if you are using these products to kill the viruses out there, be sure to have your surface wet with the disinfectant for 10 minutes.
What does Red Door Cleaning use as a disinfectant?
We use a one minute kill time disinfectant, which is much easier than 10 minutes. It is approved by Health Canada and is on Health Canada’s list of hard-surface disinfectants with evidence against COVID-19. It is made by Diversey and it is called Oxivir.
Lysol wipes claim to be a 2 minute kill time, so that is another good alternative if you’re looking to use it in your home. Again, just make sure the surface remains wet for 2 minutes.
If you are looking for a shorter dwell time, I suggest calling your local janitorial store. Personally, we use Regent Supply in Edmonton and they are absolutely amazing and so helpful!
