You’ve been washing your hair every morning and washing your face and underwear every night for the last week, but then you read an article about another person who does this every day and thought, why shouldn’t I?
A new Consumer Reports survey of 1,237 households in the US found that 15% of people and 24% of women spend more than four hours a day cleaning the inside of their television – so your $50 monthly electricity bill has just gone up. (That said, your fridge is going to run hotter.) If you don’t look after your telly, you might lose control of it, too. Less than half the owners admitted knowing the voltage level of their set, while one in five hadn’t checked the TV’s technical specifications in the last two years. Energy-efficient TVs just don’t break, do they? No, they won’t. In fact, they are more prone to breaking or going out of date. The ideal time to buy a new one is the day you take one out for the first time, and unless you’re capable of swinging a hammer, you’re better off saving your money and disposing of it in some way you can dispose of it legally.
To wash a TV, you need to use solutions containing phosphates to absorb dirt, petrol to heat it up and alcohol to kill germs. What’s more, you can only clean one set at a time, and sometimes you’ll end up with rough surrounding the screen, such as being given a dud DVD.
“Hooking TVs up to motors is like leaving the oven on the electric range,” says Philip Lawler, director of technology for Consumer Reports. Most new TVs have smart TV features that allow you to programme recordings directly on to the television set – but unfortunately, TVs with “unusable” pictures will not automatically give you a remote control for access to your recording.
Keep up the good work, washing your own bums if you must.