How often you should clean your phone and keyboards sparks shocking debate
When was the last time you properly disinfected your smartphone?
Our phones are with us pretty much all day, every day - whether we're at work or on holiday, taking a hike or going for a drive, so it's no surprise that they can get grimy pretty quickly.
There are scales of dirtiness, too, ranging from a slightly smudged screen to gunk in the speaker grille and crusty stuff in the charging port.
So, it's pretty much common sense to give your phone a wipe down every so often to keep this all at bay - but exactly how often that should happen is the subject of more debate, as demonstrated by a popular Reddit post asking the question: 'How often do you clean your phones and keyboards?'
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The poster adds: "I tend to clean my phone and keyboards almost everyday and washing my hands regularly. Apparently that's too much according to my friend, so wondering how often others do."
The post has clocked up 140 comments - and the range of responses is truly remarkable.
As often happens, a joke takes the top spot, with one Redditor commenting: "If a day is 4 years long then I'm the same." This echoes a lot of comments, showing people might clean their devices a whole lot less than they perhaps should.
The next top comment is someone expressing a little more gentle bemusement at an everyday cleaning schedule: "The phone gets cleaned if I drop it in the mud or smear chocolate on it or something like that. So erm, yeah, seems a little unusual to do this every day."
But there's one response that chimes with us the most.
It says: "My keyboard gets a hoover once a month or so to remove cat hairs, ash and crumbs and maybe a proper, pop-the-keys-off clean every year or two. My phone gets a wipe with my T-shirt once or twice a day depending on how many smears it has."
That mixture of proper cleaning periodically with everyday maintenance to ensure things don't get too bad seems like a pretty safe middle ground to us.
After all, just like wiping your phone down without needing to resort to cleaning fluids and cloths, you can fairly easily keep your keyboard from getting too gross by just turning it upside down and giving it a few taps every so often.
If you've never done that, you might be surprised (or even a tiny bit terrified) by the amount of dust, hair, crumbs and more that will tumble out from between the keys.
That applies more to external keyboards and mechanical ones than it does laptop keyboards, though, which don't tend to have gaps around the keys for dust to invade.