Three cleaning products will do a whole kitchen

Walk into most kitchens and you will find eight or nine cleaning bottles under the sink. Read the backs and you will find that four of them are the same thing with different marketing.

You need three.

A multi-surface cleaner handles worktops, tables, cupboard doors, tiles and the outside of appliances. This is ninety per cent of kitchen cleaning and a 2 litre concentrate diluted into a spray bottle costs a fraction of buying the same volume pre-mixed.

A degreaser, for the extractor hood, the back of the hob and the oven. This is the one job the multi-surface cleaner genuinely cannot do, because grease needs something more alkaline and more time than a quick spray and wipe.

A dish soap, which doubles as a hand-wash for pots and, diluted, as a perfectly good floor cleaner.

Everything else is optional. Glass cleaner is convenient but a microfibre cloth and water does the same job. Antibacterial sprays matter for raw meat surfaces and for very little else; for a wiped worktop, the mechanical action of the cloth removes more than the chemistry does.

Two things genuinely worth knowing. Never mix bleach with anything containing ammonia or acid, including some limescale removers; the reaction produces a gas that will send you outside coughing, and in a small kitchen it is dangerous rather than unpleasant. And give a disinfectant its contact time, which is usually a few minutes on the label. Sprayed and immediately wiped, it has not done anything.

Buying concentrate in a larger bottle and diluting as you go is cheaper per use, produces less plastic and takes up less cupboard space. It is one of the few cases where the bulk option is better in every direction.