8 Best Cleaners to Use with a Drillbrush Power Scrubber

The Drillbrush Power Scrubber may be the fastest and easiest way to tackle tough stains, but no cleaning brush scrubs alone. Using a Drillbrush with a cleaning agent is the best way to unstick dirt and grime on household surfaces.

We get a lot of questions from customers asking which cleaner is the best to use with Drillbrush. The answer to that is… it depends.

Some cleaning jobs are more difficult than others, and some require specific chemicals to work their magic before you start scrubbing.

So we’ve compiled a list of several cleaners we find ourselves going back to again and again. These picks consist of products we commonly recommend to customers, ones we use in the office or official Drillbrush media, and cleaners that are bundled or commonly paired with our brushes.

Without further ado, let’s see what we’ve got in the cleaning closet.

Soap and Water

A classic combo!

We’ll start simple; a plain old mixture of soap and water. If we have something quick and easy to clean, we usually have a spray bottle on standby full of water and a little dish soap. 

Any common dish soap will do. Sometimes, if applicable, we’ll also make mixtures using some of the chemicals below. We typically do this if the cleaner doesn’t come in a spray bottle or would be better cut down from its full potency. We’ll mention which ones in their respected sections.

You can also add less water and more cleaner to make a cleaning paste out of particularly goopy cleaning products. This is what we often recommend doing, especially if you’re looking to reduce splatter. You can find more tips about splatter management in this video.

All-Purpose Useful Cleaning Paste

Useful indeed!

If you want a cleaning paste, but don't fee like making it yourself, Useful Products has a cleaning paste that works very well with Drillbrush products; Useful Cleaning Paste.

All-Purpose Useful Cleaning Paste is a multi-purpose cleaner that can be used on bathroom, kitchen, glass, and other household surfaces. You can dab some of the paste from the tub on a surface or apply it directly to brush itself by placing your Drillbrush in the tub and spinning the brush gently. The tub is 4 inches in diameter, which means the 4 inch, Original, and 2 inch brushes from our popular 42O kits can easily do this trick.

Once the bristles are coated up, you can start scrubbing. Useful Cleaning Paste subs up nicely and is effective at cleaning messes on tile grout, stainless steel kitchen sinks, and even pots and pans!

Also included with the cleaner is two Drillbrush scrub pads. These pads come in Soft White and Stiff Red make for nice, flexible hand scrubbers. However, if you have a 3 inch pad backer you can skip the elbow work and clean like you would with any standard Drillbrush.

Not only is this cleaner literally useful, it smells great too! It has a very nice lemon-lime soda scent, which is a pretty unique fragrance in the world of cleaners. You can pick up a tub of Useful Cleaner here. 

Bar Keepers Friend

And Your Friend Too!

We get a lot of calls asking for recommendations, and one of the cleaners we recommend the most is Bar Keepers Friend. Unique for this list, Bar Keeper’s Friend is powdered cleaner, so it's sprinkled on a pre-dampened surface to create a cleaning paste, rather than being poured or sprayed on its own.

It can be used on a wide variety of surfaces, like porcelain bathroom fixtures, kitchen stoves and countertops, and outdoor areas . Being a powder, it’s grittier than other cleaners on this list, but not a full-on abrasive. That being said, it’s not for use on delicate or painted surfaces. If you're uncertain, the Bar Keeper’s Friend website has a usage guide you can view.

They call it a “Friend” for a reason, it’s an extremely helpful cleaner that can can give you the scrubbing support you need. You can find Bar Keeper’s Friend here. 

Drill-tergent

See what we did there?

A little self-promotion, but Drillbrush has it’s own bottled cleaner; Drill-tergent. It’s a viscous cleaner built for bathroom cleaning tasks. However, it’s versatile enough to be used in other areas, like the kitchen or on vinyl furniture. 

We don’t just sell Drill-tergent, we also use it! Many of our pictures and videos of Drillbrush products in action are done using Drill-tergent as the cleaner. So if you are impressed by our cleaning content, then you’ll love Drill-tergent!

You can pick up a bottle of Drill-tergent on our website or get it as part of a special Medium Yellow 4-2-O Bathroom Cleaning kit.

Turtle Wax Power Out Upholstery Cleaner

Definitely Turtley Enough for the Turtle Club

You may be more familiar with Turtle Wax for their car polish, but they also make cleaning products too!

In our car seat upholstery cleaning vlog, we used it to clean some deep-set stains in the backseat fabric. It created some satisfying suds and made quick work of the mess. We even used it again in another vlog to clean up a several week old milkshake spill off a back seat with resounding success!

This cleaner has a special nozzle that sprays the cleaner out from a built-in scrubber. It’s a very clever idea, though personally, we find it a bit cumbersome to scrub with, as it’s a very stiff brush and holding onto the bottle to scrub doesn’t give you enough leverage to hand-scrub efficiently. Call us biased, but we prefer using a Drillbrush.

That being said, it’s a very solid cleaning solution and one that I personally keep in my car in case one of my passengers attempts to take a sip of their Mega Gulp Root Beer while I pass over a speed bump. You can find Turtle Wax Upholstery Cleaner here.

Weber Grate Grill Cleaner

Makes grates look great!

Grill cleaning is important to us at Drillbrush. We have a whole line of brushes dedicated to it. So when we start prepping for summer, we make sure we have a cleaner on standby.

Our recommendation is Weber Grate Grill Cleaner, a spray-based cleaner that is effective in loosening up burnt-on gristle and sticky build-up on grills.

We used Weber Grill Cleaner extensively in our Grill Cleaning guide, as it was powerful enough to assist the Drillbrush in its scrubbing some heinous build-up under the hood, but not too overpowering or harsh to work with in a normal setting.

You can find Weber Grate Grill Cleaner here.

Simple Green

A Simple Choice, Really

Simple Green is an All-Purpose Cleaner that is built to be diluted with water, similar to the soap and water method we mentioned earlier. It’s an incredibly versatile cleaner, and you can see their list of applications and tips here. We at Drillbrush tend to use it mostly for bathroom surfaces or automotive interiors.

It’s also one of the best smelling cleaners on the list. They come in sassafras, lemon, and lavender scents, which have a delightful aroma.

Drillbrush has a deal with Simple Green where you can get a container of Simple Green, two spray bottles, and a Soft White 5 inch Flat Drillbrush in one kit. You can get that kit here.

Majic-Clean

Do you believe in Magic (clean)?

Lastly, we have Majic-Clean, a general purpose cleaner that is a favorite of ours for tougher stains and surfaces. 

Unlike the other cleaners on this list, Magic-Clean has a slight abrasive, made from materials used in jeweler's rouge. This gives it enough grit while scrubbing stuck-on messes and polishing surfaces without causing scratches.

Majic-Clean has a cream-like consistency that is great for making cleaning pastes. In many of our videos, we’ll put down some Majic-Clean, then spray it down with water to make it more spreadable.

Typically, we use Majic-clean on surfaces like tubs, sinks, tile, and vinyl furniture. It does a great job removing heavily caked on grime and smoothing out the finish on stainless steel. Usually, when the going gets tough, this is the cleaner we go to!

You can find Majic-Clean here.

Cleaning Solution Solutions

When you need to clean, you need the right tools for the job, and for us, it’s a fleet of Drillbrush Power Scrubbers and a cabinet stocked with these cleaners. 

Do you have a cleaner that you like using with Drillbrush products? Let us know in the comments!

If you’re looking for more recommendations, we also have an article about which cordless drills are the best to use with Drillbrush, which you can check out here, as well as An article featuring some of my personal favorite Drillbrush kits.