We are investigating:
"The efficiency of cleaning detergent products and cleaning materials, such as sponges and cleaning rags."
Our Group 4 Project this year focuses on ‘Bathroom Sciences’. Our idea for this project started out as a brainstorm on what we could investigate in the school bathrooms. Sanitation is a main concern in public bathrooms and we were interested in finding the best combination of ‘cleaning detergent product’ and ‘cleaning material’ to effectively eliminate germs. For our investigation we decided to use different price ranges of cleaning products and different textured materials. This way we had a wide range of data that could give us reliable results. We think that our idea will be successful and will also help the audience in understanding the relation between price and effectiveness of the cleaning products we used.
We used the following equipment:
The products to kill the bacteria on the Petri dishes were:
- Cillit Bang €4.28
- Mastro Lindo Bagno €2.35
- Smac per Bagno €1.84
The materials we used to collect the bacteria from the floor were:
- Strofinacci Scotzesi (cloth) €1.51
- Scotch Brite Spugna (sponge) €1.61
- Spugna Conad (thin sponge) €1.40
- Panno Nuovo Vileda (spongy cloth) €2.28
Other:
- 17 prepared Petri dishes
- Cotton swabs
- 3 small beakers
- 3 small Pipettes
- Incubator
- Stopwatch
- Scissors
- Gloves
- Masking tape
Below is a picture of this equipment:
The aims of our experiment are:
- To find the most effective cleaning material.
- To find the most effective cleaning product.
- To relate the cost of the product to effectiveness of product.
- To find the best combination of cleaning material with cleaning product.
METHOD:
1) Cut equal sizes of four different cleaning sponges (11.5cm by 7cm)
2) Pour 20ml depth of each detergent into three different beakers. There are 3 different detergents.
3) Prepare 16 Petri dishes. 4 Petri dishes for each cleaning sponge. 4 for each detergent. Each Petri dish will be labeled with the cleaning product and cleaning material used.
4) Choose a section of the bathroom floor to place the cleaning sponge. The section should be small, not spread out.
5) Scrub each material on the floor for 5 seconds and with the same amount of force for each material.
6) Leave the materials on the floor untouched for 2 minutes.
7) Using a cotton swab, swab the sponges, with the same force and same amount of time.
8) Swab the cotton into the various respective Petri dishes.
9) Add 5 pipette drops of undiluted cleaning product into the appropriately labeled Petri dishes.
10) Seal carefully with tape the Petri dishes.
11) Place them into the incubator for 48 hours.
12) Check after the 24th hour to see progress and development.
13) After 48 hours take the Petri dishes out of the incubator.
14) Count the number of bacteria cultures on each Petri dish by circling each speck with a marker.
15) Record the results.
This is a picture showing our group placing the cleaning detergents into the petri dishes.
This is a graph showing our results. Each bacteria culture equals one bacteria, meaning that each bacteria originally picked up grew into one culture.
