How often should you deep clean a home in Kerala?

A weekly clean handles what you can see: floors, surfaces, bathrooms, the kitchen counter. A deep clean handles what you cannot — the tops of cupboards and fans, behind and under heavy furniture, inside the kitchen chimney and cabinets, the grouting, the upholstery, and the places damp starts.

In a dry climate those places load up slowly. In Kollam they do not. Airborne dust lands on surfaces that are rarely completely dry, so it sticks rather than blowing off; kitchen grease and humidity together produce the film on top of cabinets that a cloth alone slides across; and the monsoon leaves behind exactly the conditions that mould needs.

• OCTOBER–NOVEMBER, after the south-west monsoon. This is the important one. It clears what four months of damp left — mould starts, musty cupboards, damp-bound dust — before the north-east monsoon adds to it.
• BEFORE ONAM, in August or early September. The festival clean is a Kerala fixture and the demand is real, so booking a week or two ahead is the difference between the date you want and whatever is left.
• BEFORE SUMMER, around February or March, if you are cleaning twice and the second slot is flexible. Everything dries quickly and it pairs naturally with the pre-summer AC service.

The slots people struggle to get are the last ten days before Onam and the first dry fortnight after the monsoon breaks. Both are entirely predictable, which makes them the two worth booking early.

Worth being specific about, because this is the service where the gap between providers is widest and the word covers very different jobs.

• Kitchen — cabinets inside and out, chimney and hob degreasing, the tops of units, tiles and grouting, behind the fridge.
• Bathrooms — descaling, grouting, taps and fittings, the exhaust, the ceiling.
• Living areas — fans, lights, the tops of cupboards and doors, skirting, switch plates, windows and grilles, and behind and under the heavy furniture.
• Floors — scrubbed rather than mopped, with the corners and edges done by hand.
• Soft furnishings — sofa and mattress cleaning where booked, which in this climate is worth more than it sounds.
• Balconies, utility areas and the places that fall between rooms.

A two-bedroom flat is a day for a team of two or three. A larger house, or more bathrooms, or a kitchen that has not been deep cleaned in years, runs longer — and we would rather book the right amount of time than send one person for twelve hours.

What keeps a house in reasonable shape in this climate is much less about scrubbing and much more about air and dryness.

• Open the house up on dry mornings. Cross-ventilation for an hour does more against damp than any product.
• Run bathroom and kitchen exhausts during use and for a few minutes after — and check that they vent outside rather than into a false ceiling.
• Leave a gap between heavy furniture and external walls so air can move behind it.
• Deal with a small damp patch when it is small. That is the whole difference between a wipe and a repaint.