I cleaned my fridge every Sunday for a year. I was cleaning the wrong thing.

It was a Wednesday night. Of course it was.

I opened the fridge to do the kids' packed lunches and there they were. The strawberries from the Saturday Tesco shop. Grey fuzz on top. Already.

Behind them, the bag of salad had gone slimy at the bottom. Half a cucumber, soft at one end. And a Tupperware of Sunday's curry with no lid, because the lids live somewhere I will never find.

I held the strawberries over the bin and said it out loud. “Every week. Every flipping week.”

Dan shouted from the sofa. “Is the fridge eating the fruit again?”

Very funny, Dan.

The annoying bit? Strawberries are the one thing both kids actually eat. Ruby won't go near a carrot. Josh says apples are “too crunchy”. But strawberries, they'll eat by the punnet. If the punnet makes it to Wednesday.

So I buy them every Saturday. Plus the salad and the veg I keep hoping someone will eat.

And by midweek, a chunk of it is in the bin.

I decided it was me. The fridge must be dirty.

So every Sunday night, everything came out. Shelves in the sink. Drawers in the sink. Hot soapy water, then vinegar, because a woman on Facebook swore by it. I even put a box of bicarb at the back. That's what you do, isn't it? My mum did it. Her mum did it.

The fridge looked amazing. I was a bit proud of it, honestly.

On Wednesday, the strawberries had fuzz.

So I blamed the fridge. It's eight years old. I looked at new ones online and shut the laptop pretty quickly.

Then I blamed the shop. I swapped supermarkets for a month. Same fuzz, different punnet.

I started to feel a bit thick, if I'm honest. I've kept two children alive for fifteen years between them. And I couldn't keep a punnet of strawberries going till Wednesday?

One night I couldn't sleep. So I did the midnight thing and typed “why does fruit go off so fast in the fridge” into my phone.

Two things came up that nobody had ever told me.

The first was ethylene. It's a gas. Apples, bananas, pears and tomatoes give it off as they ripen. It's basically their “ripen now” signal. And salad and leafy greens are sensitive to it.

I thought of my nan straight away. Bananas in their own bowl, always, away from everything else. I thought it was one of her funny little rules. She knew exactly what she was doing.

Now picture the fridge. It's a closed box. Whatever gas the fruit gives off just hangs about in there, with everything else I bought on Saturday.

The second thing was mould spores. They're tiny and they float. They don't need a dirty shelf at all. They drift about in the air until they land on something soft. Like a punnet of strawberries.

I put the phone down on my chest and stared at the ceiling.

A whole year of Sunday nights. Scrubbing shelves.

The problem was never the shelves. It was the air.

And you can't wipe the air.

Once I knew that, the question changed. I didn't need a cleaner fridge. I needed something that dealt with the air inside it.

That's how I found Noova.

My first reaction? I laughed. It's a little perforated steel cylinder that sits in your palm. You pop it on a shelf. That's it. No plug, no batteries, no buttons.

No way, I thought. It's a bit of metal.

But I'd already wasted enough money on things that didn't help. So this time I actually read how it works. Properly.

This is how I explained it to Dan, so bear with me.

The steel is just the case. Inside it is something called a catalytic core.

The core gives off oxidising agents into the fridge air. They catch the ethylene, the mould spores and the food smells, and break them down. What's left is water and carbon dioxide.

“So it's like the bicarb,” said Dan.

No, Dan. That's the whole point.

Bicarb is a sponge. It soaks smells up until it's full. Then it just sits there, full, until you remember to buy another box. I never remember.

A catalyst is different. It makes the reaction happen without getting used up itself. So the core never fills up. Nothing to refill, nothing to recharge. One Noova lasts 5 years.

“Five years? For thirty-five quid?” said Dan.

Which is exactly what I worked out next, on the back of a Tesco receipt.

£29.99 + £4.99 delivery, spread over 5 years, that's about 58p a month.

I've binned more than 58p of strawberries in one go.

So I went to the reviews. Not the five-word ones. The long ones, from people who sounded like me.

I've copied a few here exactly as they wrote them, typos and all. Weirdly, that's what made me trust them.

That was the line for me. “I was throwing so much away it was driving me insane.” I could have written that. I think I actually have, in a text to my sister.

Many customers say their food lasts up to twice as long. Every fridge is different, I know. But I'd run out of ideas.

Just the one. It's only our kitchen fridge, and £29.99 + £4.99 delivery felt like enough of a gamble on something I'd laughed at. A free e-book came with it too.

It turned up a week and a half later, inside the 7–9 working days the website said.

Josh got to the box first. “Mum, why are we putting a robot in the fridge?”

It's not a robot. It doesn't even have a battery.

I put it on the middle shelf, behind the yoghurts, and shut the door. That was the whole setup. I kept waiting for a step two. There isn't one.

A day or so later, I opened the fridge and didn't do the little wince. No curry. No cheese that Dan swears isn't that strong. It just smelled of cold fridge.

The Tupperware still has no lid, mind. Some things a steel cylinder can't fix.

I know. That's what you really want to know.

I'm not going to give you a number. I haven't weighed my bin, and I'm not about to pretend I have.

The strawberries are still my test. Every Saturday, a punnet goes in. Every Wednesday, I check. And I'll leave the verdict to people who've had theirs longer than me:

What I can tell you is this. The fridge doesn't smell. And the little steel cylinder just sits there behind the yoghurts, doing its thing.

Ruby has named it Steve.

Questions? contact.support@getnoova.com

Got a second fridge? Packs of 2 (£54.99) and 3 (£74.99) come with free UK delivery.

If you've ever stood over the bin on a Wednesday, holding food you bought on Saturday and feeling a bit daft, please stop blaming yourself.

You didn't do anything wrong. Nobody told you about the air.

Now you know.

Lisa x

Lisa's story is based on what Noova customers told us. Reviews quoted are real and unedited.

45-day risk-free trial from the date of delivery: refund on return. Return postage is paid by the customer. This is in addition to your statutory rights.

Noova™ · getnoova.com · contact.support@getnoova.com