Mike Hosking says he did not know there were other hosts working in the studio when asked about the vacuum debacle.

Broadcaster Rachel Smalley has revealed colleague Mike Hosking sometimes vacuums the Newstalk ZB studio while she is on-air.

She's the latest of Hosking's ZB colleagues to take issue with his neat-freak habits, after afternoon hosts Kerre McIvor and Mark Dye got worked up over him leaving his vacuum cleaner in the studio.

Smalley hosts Bayley's Early Edition, a Newstalk ZB show that runs before Hosking's popular breakfast show. Speaking to McIvor and Dye on the phone on Thursday afternoon, she rattled off an impressive list of gripes in a rant to rival one of Hosking's famous "Mike's Minutes".

Supplied Newstalk ZB host Rachel Smalley has hit out at colleague Mike Hosking's cleaning habits.

"Where do I even start?" Smalley said. "Who gets up at that hour of the morning to start and doesn't drink coffee? He doesn't. He has this small little teacup and he goes and gets a little slice of lemon and puts it in some warm water, not too hot. Then he has a little Tupperware container with a variety of five different types of nuts.

READ MORE:

* Mike Hosking to stay on Seven Sharp despite 22,000 signature petition

* Newsreader Bernadine Oliver-Kerby says Mike Hosking 'man's time' drama 'hilarious'

* Stop the nonsense, and leave Mike Hosking alone

"That's bad enough, and you can barely talk to him because he just can't speak at that hour of the morning, does his work, that's fine. I go into the studio in the morning, potter around, I don't have the cast of thousands supporting me like he does, in the program. So Laura, the efficient German producer, and I get about our business and do our show.

"He often comes in, I'm not kidding, when I'm on air, and gets the vacuum and plugs it in and starts the vacuuming. While I am on air, I'm not kidding. The man is an a-hole. And he will say, 'Look at this pigsty'. I can't see anything wrong with it. If there's a pen that's left on the desk, he will come and hold it up like someone's had leprosy and left a limb behind, I'm not kidding."

"The other thing that happens is apparently you guys put paper in the rubbish bin, and so does Larry [Williams], and [Hosking] comes in and holds it up like it's full of chicken carcasses, and goes, 'Who did this, who did this?'"

Smalley joined McIvor and Dye in the "elsewhere camp", a band of radio hosts who want Hosking to keep his vacuum cleaner somewhere other than the studio.

Smalley was at the mall when she received McIvor and Dye's call, and said she'd sit on the mall Santa's knee and ask for a "new breakfast host that isn't vacuuming every five minutes".

Hosking is a well-known clean freak, and last year was famously photographed vacuuming his Ferrari.

On Thursday morning he responded to McIvor and Dye's previous comments that he should put his vacuum cleaner away after he finished using it instead of leaving it for others to trip over.

"In my defence, I didn't know there were other hosts working at this radio station, but apparently there are," Hosking said.

He went on to argue that he left the device out in the hope that others would use it to clean the studio too.