Fridge Cleaning, Sydney

A fridge is the appliance people postpone longest, and it is usually postponed for a good reason: doing it properly means emptying it, and emptying it means finding somewhere for the contents to go for an hour. So it gets a wipe of the shelf that had the spill on it and the door closes again.

The shelves are the easy part and they are not really the point. The two places that matter are the door seals and the drain channel. A door seal is a folded rubber bellows, and the fold holds moisture, crumbs and eventually mould along its whole run. It is also the part that determines whether the door actually seals, so a loaded seal is not only unpleasant, it costs you cooling. We clean along the full fold rather than across the face of it.

The drain channel sits at the back of the fridge behind the crisper drawers, and it is how condensation leaves the cabinet. When it blocks, water pools under the drawers, and that pool is the source of nearly every fridge smell we are ever called about. Clearing it takes a couple of minutes if you know it is there and never happens if you do not.

The rest is method rather than mystery. Shelves, drawers and door bins come out and are washed, the cabinet is cleaned top down so nothing drips onto a surface already done, and everything is dried before it goes back so there is no residual moisture to start the cycle again. We use food-safe products throughout, because it is a food-storage appliance and nothing else would be defensible.

One practical note that saves everybody time. Have the fridge emptied before we arrive if you possibly can. We can empty and repack it, but that is a separate quoted line rather than part of the clean, and it adds real time to the visit.