diff --git a/src/scrapy_redis/spiders.py b/src/scrapy_redis/spiders.py
index 110f21ab..caaa23db 100644
--- a/src/scrapy_redis/spiders.py
+++ b/src/scrapy_redis/spiders.py
@@ -84,7 +84,7 @@ def setup_redis(self, crawler=None):
             self.count_size = self.server.llen
 
         if self.max_idle_time is None:
-            self.max_idle_time = settings.getint(
+            self.max_idle_time = settings.get(
                 "MAX_IDLE_TIME_BEFORE_CLOSE",
                 defaults.MAX_IDLE_TIME
             )