IndianRingNeck.com

Cleaning up my birds cage as well as the area around it can be quite a pain. I don't want to use chemical cleaners, although just using soap, water and a scrub pad takes a decent amount of muscle to get everything nice and clean. I also don't have any good place to rinse off the larger parts of the cage, which means I'm usually struggling with it in my kitchen sink. So I've been looking for solutions... What methods do use and/or suggest?

Also, I recently have been looking into a powered steam cleaner as it seems like a pretty good solution. It fits a lot of the bill, non-chemical, kills most bacteria, also should pick up a lot of the mess without too much work. I wanted to bring the idea up to see if anyone else uses them, or has suggestions to similar devices.

We use a high pressure cleaner (Karcher is the brand name of it) on the cage outside for the "big" clean. For day to day clean, we put newspaper down on the cage floor and throw that away and then use a dust buster to suck up any other loose bits. We also put a disposable painter's sheet down on the floor under the cage and gym area and throw it away once a week or once every two weeks. You can still sweep it and it protects the floors from too much mess. It is wasteful but that's what we're doing at the moment. I've tried putting down the plastic carpet protector stuff like they have in prize homes but we found it made our wood floors sweat and was also hard to clean.

Ellie.

Steam-cleaners are awesome little gadgets. They do make a little more mess than pictured on TV but it's nothing you can't handle.

Any removable parts I wash outside or in the tub, the main cage bit I just spray down and scrub with a brush and wipe clean with rags or paper towels.

Around the cage I just vaccuum. To get poo out of carpet I use vinegar/water solution and dab it out with a paper towel.

For cleaning you can also use a GSE (grapefruit seed extract) solution.

Interesting article: http://www.landofvos.com/articles/clean.html