But now Barbara is sharing her simple 30-second trick for cleaning filthy filters, and says it’s something all households should do ‘every week’.
‘I’ve been cleaning homes for 30 years, and it’s always the first thing I go to when I start my cleans - the rangehood filters,’ she tells New Idea Food. ‘They smell, are oily and there’s really no reason to leave them that way.
‘After I’ve taken them out, all I do is pop them in the dishwasher on a hot cycle with a dishwashing tablet - it seriously takes 30 seconds. By the time I’ve finished cleaning the house, the dishwasher has finished and I pop the filters back in - they’re always super clean and sparkling new.
‘It’s often something people overlook, but really I feel that people should put their rangehood filters in the dishwasher every week. They hold a lot more grease, grime and gunk than people think, and can get pretty disgusting pretty quickly. It’s a secret filth trap that shouldn’t be ignored.’
Before and after photos at the top of the page show just how well a dishwasher will transform your filters. Barbara adds that she’s seen a lot of cleaning hacks for filters over the years, but nothing works as well as a dishwasher.
‘There are products from Bunnings that I’ve tried and I’ve also soaked them overnight in all sorts of solutions, but nothing works like the dishwasher,’ she says. 'It's simple and it works.'
