•  On Jun, 09, 2022
•  admin
•   Detergent, Disinfection, Surface Cleaning

Microbial is in everywhere, it could even grow in the water without surprise. In this article, we focus to explain the general understanding of microbial grow.

Microbes or microbial is a common name for microorganism. It has a wide coverage includes bacteria, fungi and virus. Since we are not a biology article, the microbe we mention in this article include of these 3 substances.

Did the microbe grow in a detergent solution?

Mechanism of Microbial Growth

At the beginning, we have to understand the mechanism for a microbial grow so that we could answer if the microbial grow in the detergent solution? In general, it is very hard for us to visually see a single microbial grow unless we are equipped with appropriate tools. However, since the microbial grow in a colony basis, hence we could identify cluster grow. The more the colony, the bigger the cluster.

The microbial grow in several mechanism:

1. Split Cell. This is the rapid kind of cell grow. The microbial shall grow exponentially as short as 20min per cycle.
2. Budding. The parent cell will grow a “bud” and discrete from the parent cell. The parent cell will continue to grow another budding.

Factors affecting the Microbial Grow

Microbial is likes many other substances, it could only grow unless the environment and nutrient is sufficient to support the growth. Let us identify the condition which favourable for a microbial grow. Even though not all microbial having the same leaving condition, but there are always some common factors which affecting the grow.

1. Environment.
   1. Temperature
   2. Acidity
   3. Oxygen level
   4. Water
2. Nutrient
   1. Carbohydrate.
   2. Fat.
   3. Protein.
   4. N, P, K. Nitrogen is a necessity substance for synthesis of protein. Phosphorous and Potassium are the main substance to form a cell.

The Detergent Ingredient

The detergent solution is the combination of surfactant, wetting agent, emulsifier and much more. The surfactant is the substance which uses to lower down the surface tension which eventually help in contaminant removal. However, some of the surfactants are derived from organic base substance, hence it is prone to consists nutrient which requires for microbial grow.

In addition, the detergent solution also consists of adequate amount of disinfectant substance. The disinfectant substance acts as the substance to forbid the grow in the detergent naturally.

The Evidence

Dish washing basin is the most convenient place for us to see the evidence. We could observe mould marks on the dish cleaning sponge, perhaps this is the strong evidence that the microbial is actually growing under wet condition even with the existence of detergent.

Let us see what is the substances which in the dish cleaning sponge.

• The sponge is wet and staying in room temperature.
• The organic left over substance transfer from the dish is hiding inside the porous structure in the sponge.

The Disinfectant in the Detergent

Most of the household detergent comes with disinfectant or bacteriostat, this is a substance which stop the growth of microbial in the detergent solution. However, during the cleaning process, the bacteriostat is being washed out and the detergent becomes favour to microbial grow.

This also a strong evidence that the detergent under stock solution is not favour in microbial grow but after being diluted into working solution, it becomes favour to microbial.

How to Remove the Microbial

So far, we agree the existence of microbial in everywhere. Now we move further to discuss the method to disinfect the microbial in the water. There are a wide variety we could adopt for removing lively microbial. But in this article, we limit our discussion in household application.

Bleach, hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and disinfectant tablet are the common disinfectant substance we could get for household application. Unfortunately, not all the disinfectant are the same as it may cause adverse effect on the underline substrate surface. For instance, bleach may be not advisable to clean up a metal surface. Furthermore, the bleach solution shall not be added in to drinking water too! In order words, user has to wisely select the disinfectant materials.

Apart from the disinfectant solution, we also have to apply mechanical way to remove the microbial. For the solution which already consists of large colony of microbial, user could perform filtration activity to filter away the solid contaminant.

There are many ways to control the microbe grow in the solution.

To answer the question posted early in this article. Yes, microbe does able to stay alive in detergent solution while environment solution is suitable. Talk to DST in case you are not so sure which type of disinfectant to select.