Why UV Flashlights Should Come with Warning Labels

A month or so ago, Laurie Perry (aka Crazy Aunt Purl) wrote a blog post about Kim & Aggie, the Queens of Clean from How Clean is Your House. That reminded me that, hey, I like that show! Wanting to find any episodes I missed, I promptly set up my DVR to record the thrice-daily showings on BBC America. This would be fun!

I had no idea what I was starting.

For those who haven't seen the original British version of How Clean is Your House, here's how it goes. Kim and Aggie go to a filthy house somewhere in the U.K., usually one that is filled to the brim with clutter as well as dirt. With horror music as their accompaniment, they explore the mess in such a way as to leave no question about how little care the homeowner has taken. They push monster cobwebs to one side, stick their finger into a half inch of rancid fat in the kitchen, and sniff stained carpets and bedclothes in such a way as to make you shudder.

Once all of us are suitably disturbed by the state of the house, we hear the story of the homeowners. Some confess that they haven't cleaned in ten years or more; others weakly claim to clean every few weeks. Some they insist their home is untidy but not filthy; others know it is an absolutely tip and are overwhelmed at how to fix it. Kim usually rolls her eyes at their excuses, calls them dirty beggars, and gives them a good tongue-lashing. Aggie softens the blows by promising that they'll show the homeowners how to get everything in order.

And then...the cleaning commences.

These are big, big cleaning jobs that require a lot of resources. The show hires a skip to haul away the unneeded clutter and they bring in a large cleaning crew to start scrubbing. Then Kim and Aggie, in the forefront, show the homeowners and the viewers how to solve various cleaning challenges. Before your eyes, they mix their own cleaners using wonderfully simple ingredients such as vinegar, lemon juice, baking soda, and soda crystals, and then proceed to make everything sparkle. You get to learn how you can clean your toilet with Coca-Cola and how dishwasher liquid can tackle three years of grease on the stove. (Er, the cooker.) You learn that newspapers that have been laying around for a couple of days can do wonders to create streak-free, clean windows and, in a pinch, ketchup can clean brass.

For me, this part it is great fun. Plucky 1950's music accompanies the happy cleaning and I start itching to clean something, too. It's just like with organizing shows; I can't watch them for very long without leaping up and finding something to put in order. I think it is in my DNA; I've always been a freak for household management strategies. At age 14 (and I share this with some embarrassment) I checked out every book on household hints from the library, wrote the best hints down on index cards, and filed them in a recipe card box by the room they applied to. Okay, so I wasn't the most fun-loving of teens. But I tell you, I was the one to stand next to when your pantyhose snagged, because I carried the clear nail polish with me. You can see why Kim & Aggie would be my heroes.

Perhaps the most interesting yet revolting part of the show is led by Aggie. She takes the role of dirt detective in this duo and before the place is cleaned, she gathers samples of the environment. This might involve taking swabs of surfaces, vacuuming dust into a special filter, putting pest traps out, or getting air quality samples. Whatever she collects, she sends off to the lab. When the results come back, she sits down with the homeowners and educates them on just what bacteria, fungus, and pests their lack-of-cleaning has nurtured.

Aggie minces no words when telling them of the health hazards. This is freaky stuff and sometimes I have to look away while I listen, because I really don't want to see these things magnified on my 42-inch screen. Often, she finds things like E. coli, salmonella, huge quantities of dust mites, carpet beetles, listeria, all manner of mold spores...you get the idea. Yuck!

I imagine most people watching the show are thinking, how do people live like this? How does it get that bad? No wonder they have dangerous bacteria around them! But once Aggie demonstrates how a surface can look clean while teeming with harmful bacteria, you have to start wondering, what is living in MY kitchen that I don't know about?

Recently, my curiosity got the best of me. I was watching some of the U.S. shows on Youtube. (A few years ago, Lifetime Television brought Kim & Aggie out for a series in the States.) In the episode I was watching, they were at the family home of two sisters in their early twenties. It was mind-numblingly filthy--so bad that they actually had to replace the bathroom walls because the toxic mold that had spread up the shower area to crawl across the ceiling. You get the idea. While much of the state of the house had to have been inherited from their parents, these girls needed to learn about hygiene.

To show the girls how important proper hand-washing is, Aggie showed them what their telephone looked like under an ultraviolet/blacklight. When she put the handset under the light, it lit up with evidence of bacteria. Ew! She started to give them a talk on hand-washing technique, but not before I was in the next room, grabbing my UV flashlight from next to the bed while holding the phone.

What? You don't keep a UV flashlight next to your bed? Oh. None of you? You're sure?

Well, anyway, in a matter of minutes I was inside my closet (where it was dark) with the flashlight, examining my telephone. As it turned out, it looked pretty darn good. So I started looking for whatever else I could find and I headed into the bathroom. With the ultraviolet light.

Kathy and I have joked about the flashlight, that all I need is a bit of luminal and I am SO ready for a crime scene investigation. We pretty much have sworn to never take it with us to a hotel room because you never want to know what it will tell you. Which begs the question, why did I take it into my bathroom?

Because I had to know. The first thing I looked at was the toilet area. That was very clean. I whipped around to the light switch. Very good but not great. And then I turned to my sink basin.

Oh. My. God!

Not okay. It was like some huge creeping crud was fluorescently crawling all over the tile...invisible in normal light (except for the soap scum from under my soap dispenser) and horrifying by blacklight.

I knew it! I am the worst housekeeper ever and we are all going to die! I swung around to the shower, which I knew would be scary because someone caulked our shower with the wrong caulking and now mold is living in it (though no place else). But that wasn't what lit up. The entire shower pan came alive with light...tendrils all over...death nipping at my toes with every morning shower!

I managed not to hyperventilate as I stumbled back into the studio. I turned to my laptop for help, desperately researching what the heck could be wrong. Maybe soap scum is fluorescent?

I didn't find anything about that, but I found out that shower curtains that seem to have soap scum on them turn out to actually harbor BIOFILMS! That's a microbial community, folks, and it is SO not okay. In one episode of How Clean is Your House, analysis revealed that a refrigerator was coated in biofilm and actually had to be disposed of, as it was so unsafe.

By this time, I was reeling in horror. My bathroom counter tile was a microbial community of death? My shower was alive with invisible bacteria? How the hell did that happen? What the heck was I going to do?

Frantic, I grabbed my cleaning caddy, stocked with non-toxic cleaners, microfiber cloths, old toothbrushes and plastic scrapers, and I got to work. I scrubbed the hell out of that bathroom vanity. Then I got the borax from the laundry room and a lemon from the fridge. I sprinkled the shower stall with borax. Cutting the lemons open, I squeezed their juice onto the borax, got down on my hands and knees, and used the lemons to scour away. I left it for a half hour with the borax and lemon paste on it, then rinsed it clean.

By then it was night. I returned to the bathroom hesitantly with the ultraviolet flashlight and turned it on. I took a look at the shower stall and...and...it looked exactly the same. That's when I stopped and thought, wait a second, that's a remarkably even, consistent pattern for bacteria. Could it be...oh, I don't know...the actual fiberglass fibers that I'm seeing? Sure looks like it!

Duh.

Then I swung the light back to the sink. Well, better - under the soap dispenser was clean - but the grout still fluoresced. I had scrubbed that furiously with a toothbrush, how could it still be alive? Turning the overhead light back on, I noticed how the grout had an almost powdery whiteness that matched the fluorescing areas. You know, I just didn't buy that it was alive. After a bit more research, I found out that efflorescence can occur in grout for tile that has not been properly installed (which would be surprised, given that this bathroom was remodeled by monkeys). Gosh, do you think that efflorescence actually...fluoresces? Or am I jumping to mad conclusions again and it really means that soon flowers will bloom between my ceramic tiles?

In the end, I was tired and in possession of either a very clean bathroom or a secret death trap. I decided to assume the former. I told Kathy the story and she just looked at me worriedly. I thought maybe she was concerned for my health, but when she spoke, she just said, "Promise me you will never examine my bathroom under a blacklight!"

Agreed.

But, you know, I'm starting to think that it wouldn't be a bad thing to do a thoroughly examination of the kitchen. That is, after I rest up a bit. My nerves are probably not ready for that yet.

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