Cleaning consumables for Airbnb: what I buy in bulk and what I still buy local

There is a category of Airbnb hosting that nobody writes about in the glossy 'passive income' posts: the cleaning consumables. Not the showy stuff — the Molton Brown hand soap or the artisanal diffuser. The actual unglamorous business of bleach, dishwasher tablets, limescale remover, and the forty-seven other things your cleaner needs to do a proper job in sixty minutes.

I've been doing this across five properties for four years. My cleaning consumable cost is about £1.80 per turnover. I know exactly what I use and where I buy it. Here's the full breakdown.

Dishwasher tablets — the maths actually matter

I was buying Finish Powerball All-in-One from Tesco. About 28p per tablet. Fine. Then I switched to Aldi Magnum Force tablets (when my cleaner in Brighton could collect) at around 12p each, and Lidl's equivalent when I could get it. The performance difference on a domestic dishwasher is honestly negligible — I had two months of data from the same machine in the same flat with the same water hardness.

For the Edinburgh properties, where my cleaner orders online and I reimburse, I use Amazon Business with the Subscribe and Save discount. The Finish Quantum Max 50-pack comes to about 22p per tablet subscribed, 26p without. Not the cheapest, but available on a reliable schedule without anyone having to think about it. For a property that runs fifty turnovers a year, at one tablet per turnover, the difference between 28p and 16p is £6 a year. It doesn't matter. What matters is that I never run out.

I never run out because I keep a par level of twenty tablets minimum per property. When the cleaner uses the last-but-five, she texts me. That's the system. Simple.

Washing-up liquid

I buy Fairy Original in the two-litre refill bottles from Costco when I do my quarterly run. About £1.40 per litre, compared to £2.20 for the standard 500ml at Tesco. I decant into the 500ml bottles I keep under each sink — branded ones from the first batch, refilled ever since. Works out at roughly 7p per turnover.

I briefly tried own-brand washing-up liquid. One guest in my Edinburgh New Town flat left a note saying the liquid 'didn't foam properly' and they'd had to use twice as much. That's probably not a meaningful data point, but I went back to Fairy.

Limescale remover — a regional problem

Brighton and Edinburgh are both hard water areas. Not catastrophically hard, but enough that without regular descaling my kettles start rattling within six months and my shower screens look foggy by week three.

I use Viakal Spray weekly on shower screens and tiles in both areas — my cleaners apply it at every third turnover, not every turn, and it holds. About 80p per application at standard pricing. For kettles I use supermarket own-brand descaler sachets at about 25p each, roughly once a month.

My Lake District property is a different problem. The water there is soft, so limescale isn't the issue — but the pipes are older and I get the occasional staining in the baths. White vinegar, diluted, applied on a schedule. Costs almost nothing.

Toilet cleaner and bleach

I standardised on Domestos Extended Germ-Kill across all five properties about two years ago. Not because it's the best value (it isn't — Aldi's own-brand bleach is about 40% cheaper per litre) but because my cleaners know the dosage, know the smell, know the bottle. Standardising on one product per category means nobody gets confused and nobody improvises with the wrong product.

Roughly 15p per toilet per turnover. Worth it for the consistency.

Surface spray — the thing I cheaped out on and regretted

I tried three rounds of switching to cheaper surface spray. Flash Multi-Surface is about £2.20 for 750ml. The Asda own-brand equivalent was 65p. On paper that's a no-brainer.

In practice, my cleaners used about twice as much of the cheap stuff to get the same result on kitchen worktops and hob surrounds. The per-clean cost ended up roughly the same. I went back to Flash. There's probably a lesson there about surface area, product concentration, and the fact that a cleaner doing ten properties a week doesn't have time to adjust technique for a new product.

Bin bags

Five properties, 270 turnovers last year, usually two bags per turnover. That's 540 bin bags. I buy 200-count rolls of 30-litre pedal bin liners from Amazon in cases of four — about 3p per bag. Total annual cost: £16.20. I mention this only because I know hosts who are still buying ten-packs from their local corner shop at 25p a bag.

Glass cleaner

I use window spray only on the properties with floor-to-ceiling glazing — two of the Edinburgh flats and the barn. Mr Muscle Window and Glass at about £1.60 per bottle, one bottle lasting roughly six turnovers at the relevant properties. Everything else gets Flash Multi-Surface on a microfibre cloth — that's fine for mirrors and TV screens.

Microfibre cloths — buy in bulk, throw away often

This is the thing I see hosts get wrong constantly. They buy one pack of microfibre cloths and then keep washing them forever. The cloths degrade, pick up smells, and eventually stop being effective. My rule: twenty cloths per property, replaced every three months whether they look worn or not. I buy 30-packs from Amazon at about £8 each — that's 27p per cloth. I throw away roughly eight cloths per property per quarter. Annual cost per property: about £22. Cheap, and a properly clean cloth at every turn makes a visible difference to streak-free surfaces.

My total cleaning consumable cost

For 270 turnovers across five properties in 2025, my total cleaning consumable spend was £487. That's £1.80 per turnover, covering everything: dishwasher tablets, washing-up liquid, limescale remover, toilet cleaner, surface spray, bin bags, glass cleaner, and cloths. I don't include cleaning products that guests use (hand soap, washing-up liquid top-ups) — those sit in the guest supplies budget.

The biggest saving wasn't switching brands. It was standardising. Every property uses the same product for each category. My cleaner in Brighton uses the same Domestos, the same Flash, the same microfibre cloths as my cleaner in Edinburgh. I buy once, in bulk, from three suppliers. It takes about ninety minutes every three months. That's the actual system.