Best Bathroom Cleaners

What are you getting rid of?

Soap scum and water stains

While soap is the agent that keeps our bodies clean, the chalky residue old soap leaves behind is often what makes our showers and baths the most dirty.

Soap scum is a combination of bar soap residue, mineral build-up from water, dirt, and body oils.

If you live in a hard water area, soap scum can mix with the magnesium and calcium deposits in water and become really caked onto your shower screen. This can look thick and chalky or even grey. Soft soap scum or newer scum looks more cloudy in appearance.

To be a soap-buster, you can select from either a store-bought bathroom cleaner, or make your own homemade cleaner.

Supermarket Shower Cleaners

When it comes to supermarket shelf solutions, reviewers on ieatwords.com.au had the most luck with using these two glass cleaners for the shower: OzKleen Shower Power and Orange Power.

DIY Soap scum removal

You may prefer a DIY approach as the best way to clean shower glass. To remove soap scum in a natural way, you can make a vinegar solution at home, containing 1 part vinegar and 1 part hot water or dishwashing detergent. This can be sprayed onto your shower screen from a spray bottle and left to sit for 20 minutes. After this, rinse the solution off, then wipe it dry with a clean, microfibre cloth.

While vinegar is the most popular home remedy for combatting soap scum, you can also try out baking soda, laundry detergent, using a magic eraser or even a pumice stone.

Preventing soap scum from forming

To stop soap scum becoming a nuisance, regular cleaning can help. After showering, you can use a squeegee, a wiper-like cleaning tool, to wipe clean shower glass. Other preventative measures including using body wash instead of soap, or placing a water repellant on your shower screen.

Rust stains

When it comes to removing rust, using chemical cleaners containing bleach can actually worsen stains. Using some common household items can help to remove rust, including using the following two concoctions - vinegar and baking soda, and salt and lime.

Mould

Mould often grows in bathroom grout, especially in shower corners. You’ll know it’s there because it’s usually dark green to black in colour, lurking in the nooks and crannies of the shower.

Mould often puts its roots in grout, which makes removing it with supermarket products difficult.

Not many bathroom cleaning products claim to remove mould. Those that do usually have the active ingredient of a small concentration of bleach, at around 5%. While bleach can kill mould, only concentrations of 10% or higher are effective. Using a solution of diluted vinegar is likely to be a better solution to kill bathroom mould.

Grout

Grout refers to the white mortar in between your bathroom tiles, used to fill joins.

Since grout is naturally white in colour, it stains easily in bathrooms. Cleaning tiles in the bathroom will always involve cleaning grout. However, rather than just a regular tile cleaner, it takes specific-purpose grout cleaners to remove the stains and grime on grout.

What to look for in a bathroom cleaner

Effectiveness

This is the number one priority when looking for a bathroom cleaning product - it should do the job, ideally with minimal time and labour involved. To learn more about the cleaning performance of a product, reading consumer reviews is usually the best place to start. You can scroll up to start reading today.

Suitability for your surface

To help ensure a product is effective, check the product label to ensure a cleaner is suitable for the specific type of bathroom surface you’re cleaning. For example, a surface cleaner may be suitable for cleaning stainless steel surfaces, but not chrome.

All-purpose cleaners or multi-purpose bathroom cleaners are suitable for a number of different surfaces - like the shower screen, toilet bowls and bathtub - saving you money and time you'd spend on sourcing individual products.

Ease of Use

How easy a bathroom cleaning product is to use depends on how easy a product is to prepare and to apply, how much elbow grease you need to put in for the cleaning product to be effective, and how much time you're required to wait before removing it.

Ways of using a surface cleaner

• Dilute first: Some cleaners come in a highly concentrated solution that you need to dilute with water first.
• Spray and wipe: These are quick and convenient, as there’s no time lapse between applying the product and removing it.
• Wait some time: Many bathroom cleaners, especially those used for deep cleaning jobs, require you to apply them, wait some time, then scrub or wipe them off. Check the waiting time that the manufacturer recommends. Some prescribe times as short as 30 seconds, others 5 minutes, and others still 10 minutes. If longer, you could find it inconvenient or plain annoying to walk away then have to return to the bathroom to keep cleaning later.

Smell

This may be more important than you think in a bathroom cleaner. Harsh fumes from chemicals might not just smell strong and unpleasant, but they can irritate airways when breathed in, causing headaches, coughing or lightheadedness.

Choosing a bathroom cleaner that you can tolerate is important. You don't want to feel woozy after every bathroom cleaning session. Sourcing a product without harmful chemicals, including bleach, is likely to help.

Finding a product with a smell you actually enjoy is a bonus. A fresh, pleasant smell can also help you feel more satisfied at a job well done.

Eco-friendliness

This is an important consideration for many people. More and more householders are looking for natural, plant-based cleaning solutions as a better alternative to either breathing in potent chemicals, or having them end up in waterways.

Checking the ingredients list to compare the number of naturally derived ingredients vs chemicals is a good starting point. Other useful research includes finding out whether the product has biodegradable ingredients, recyclable or biodegradable packaging, and is greywater safe.

Value for Money

Most bathroom cleaners are cheap and affordable, ranging between $2-$10, so they’re not super expensive. The average price of a store-bought bathroom cleaner is around 80c per 100mL.

To work out a product’s value for money, it can help to think about the following:

• Check the directions for use. How much product, (e.g. millilitres, number of wipes) has the brand recommended you use for each cleaning session?
• Then check how many cleaning sessions you can have until the product runs out. This will give you an idea of roughly how many uses you’re going to get out of it.
• Consider how often you clean the bathroom to work out how often you'll have to re-stock your cleaning cabinet.

Safety

If you want to dive further into investigating the chemical composition of a bathroom cleaner, you can read the product’s Material Safety Data Sheet, sometimes provided on a manufacturer’s website. This outlines the properties of ingredients used, and whether there are any dangerous ones likely to impact on health and safety. It also lists safety precautions to take when using the product.

Always keep bathroom cleaning products out of reach of children and pets, and put spray bottle nozzles into the 'lock' position, to be on the safe side.

Wrapping up

Overall, there are plenty of ways to achieve that clean bathroom feeling. First and foremost, look for a product that wows you with its cleaning performance. It should be able to effectively tackle the cleaning task you have in mind.

Also consider how quick and easy a product is to use, as well as how suitable it is for your bathroom surfaces. Inspecting the ingredients list and considering safety can also help you make a clean decision.