The weekly chores usually mean vacuuming the carpets throughout the house but have you ever used this dust-busting gadget on your bed? The answer is probably no but when you find out what’s lurking under the sheets you won’t sleep until you’ve whizzed the cleaner across the mattress. Express.co.uk recently spent a day at Dyson’s HQ in Malmesbury and one of the biggest revelations was discovering just how disgusting our beds can be.
Dust mites thrive in places that are warm and full of dry skin to munch on and the mattress in your home offers the perfect breeding ground for these microscopic critters.
As the team at Dyson explained during our tour, dust mites themselves aren’t actually harmful but their faeces can cause all sorts of problems for people with allergies.
Most double beds that haven’t been cleaned in a while could have millions of mites wriggling around in them and once you’ve seen these things crawling under a microscope – something we had the pleasure of viewing in the Malmesbury laboratory – we promise you’ll rush to strip the bed and get vacuuming.
Now, you might be thinking that washing the sheets each week will stop the mites in their tracks but they are so small they can easily find their way through this fabric and into the mattress itself.
Things can get even worse if you let your cat or dog sleep on the bed as pets supply even more food for the mites to munch through.
Dyson says it’s a good idea to vacuum the mattress every few weeks to suck up some of the bugs that may have set up residence in the bedroom.
According to Dyson’s recent Dust Study, just 28 percent of people vacuum their mattresses despite spending one-third of their lives in bed.
It’s not just beds that could do with a clean. Dyson also advises consumers to vacuum their sofas and even their curtains.
Explaining more, Dyson said: “Dust is extremely light and the slightest action, from sitting on your sofa to turning on the air conditioning can agitate it, resulting in it becoming airborne before settling on other surfaces around the home. It is important to vacuum the different areas in your home, and not just the floors, to ensure you’re removing as much dust as possible.”
One final place to get that cleaner stuck into is any pet beds as these will be full of hair and something called pet dander. This consists of tiny, microscopic, skin particles shed by pets with fur or feathers. Much like dust, dander builds up in soft furnishings such as carpets, mattresses and pillows and is a source of food for dust mites.
Dyson’s study also found that three in four pet owners are unaware that pollen can reside on their pets, while seven in every ten owners are unaware that viruses and dust mite faeces can reside on their pets.
“It is a cause for concern if people only clean when they spot visible dust on the floor as many dust particles are microscopic in size,” says Monika Stuczen, Research Scientist in Microbiology at Dyson. “In fact, by the time people spot visible dust in the home, it is highly likely that there are dust mites in your home.”
“Many people think that pet hair is the biggest problem as it is the most visible.
“It is unsurprising that people are unaware of the other particles that may reside on their pets because these particles tend to be microscopic in size.”
If you want a good night’s sleep tonight, you might want to vacuum the bed first.
