It has been a while since I posted an update here and just thought I'd share a more mundane home happening rather than the normal grand disaster posting that have been all too frequent in the past year.
The other day I finally broke down and bought a silly Swiffer wet jet to aid in keeping all the hardwood floors here clean. I even went to the trouble of getting their special wood floor formula so that I could enjoy all the extra wood cleaning goodliness that was sure to come from this specially formulated cleaning fluid. I brought it home, loaded it up with batteries and the special swiffer wetjet for wood floors special sauce and began to scrub away.
Admittedly I don't clean up as often as maybe I should, but generally clutter and dust bunnies trigger my OCD pretty quickly so I typically vacuum on a weekly basis. After reading all of the instructions (both of them) I went to work on my living room floor. After a few minutes I noticed how dirty the cleaning pad on the swiffer was. This is great, I thought, all that dirt that had been hiding right beneath my nose is now forever trapped in this handy cleaning pad. So I ripped out a new pad and dosed the floor with some more swiffer juice and continued mopping away.
After letting everything dry I was dismayed to see how cloudy and dull the floor looked. I re-read the troubleshooting section of the Swiffer manual and discovered that if this was a problem the most likely cause was that you hadn't used enough magic juice. I am thoroughly convinced this is a ploy by their marketing department to sell more refills.
I can just envision a typical conversation on their support line:
Customer: "Hey this thing didn't clean my floor!"
Swiffy:"Oh, did you use a whole friggin $12 bottle of cleaning stuff on it?"
Cust:"Well no of course not"
Swiffy: "Well see that's your problem right there buddy. You should have read the directions where it says that if your floor is all messed up and cloudy you need to use more stuff."
Cust:"But that's ridiculous"
Swiffy:"What'd you expect from a lousy $20 magic mop from the grocery store."
So heeding their advice I grabbed another mopping pad and re-mopped the entire floor, liberally applying the magic juice until it made my eyes water from the overwhelming scent of CLEAN. As an aside, why do we insist on adding cloying perfumes, fragrances etc to everything to make things seem like they're CLEAN. Why can't we just have products that actually get things CLEAN so they just won't smell in the first place. The floor was probably even worse than before. It just looked dull and flat and terrible. I was pretty sure that I hadn't permanently ruined my nice hardwood floors but that it was definitely going to take some work to get things right again.
I grabbed a bottle of some sort of Orange essence based wood cleaner and turned my Swiffer wet-jet into a Swiffer floor mop for Orange cleaner. A liberal application of Orange juice to the swiffer pad and several minutes of vigorous mopping and scrubbing and voila I now had a nice shiny clean beautiful hardwood floor again. Of course I have now mopped the floor 6 times in the past two days trying to get from a little dusty to clean. The result though is a floor so clean and well tended that my shoes squeak from the cleanliness. And the mild scent of Orange was far more pleasant that whatever chemical "CLEAN" scent the Swiffer stuff had.
I heartily recommend that anyone out there who has thought about getting the Swiffer wet-jet not even bother . Stick with the regular Swiffer or probably better yet a plain old fashioned cotton string mop and bucket and just use your favorite household cleaner in place of their horrible stuff. The actual Swiffer mop and pad are pretty great though. Sans the lousy fluid the dry mop part does pick up an amazing amount of stuff and does do a great job trapping it in the pad
BTW I did try their standard fluid as well on the bathroom tile floor and had pretty much the same cloudy bad results there too. Not sure if it is just me but I'm pretty much convinced that this wet-jet thing sucks and that I've wasted $20.