There was a toilet brush in my hall bathroom that had been there since we moved into this house. I never liked it. It sat in its little holder next to the toilet, never quite dry, and every time I picked it up I thought about what was living down in those bristles. Last spring the handle cracked in my hand and I took it as permission to stop.
I replaced it with the Clorox ToiletWand starter kit, one wand and 16 refill heads, and I have not bought a brush since. What follows are the ten reasons it stayed in the cabinet. None of them are dramatic. They are the reasons a 52 year old woman with hard water, two bathrooms and a 16 year old son keeps putting refills on the fridge list instead of going back to the brush.
The kit that replaced the brush in my hall bathroom
One Clorox wand, 16 disposable scrubbing pads, cleaner already loaded on each one. This is the exact starter kit I bought after the old brush handle cracked.
Amazon Check Today's Price on Amazon →The pad goes in the trash, not back into a wet holder
This is the whole idea and it is the reason I never went back. I press a pad onto the head of the wand, scrub the bowl, and the pad comes off into the trash. Nothing sits wet in the corner for a week. There is no holder with an inch of grey water in the bottom that I pretend not to see. One change, and the way that bathroom smells on a Sunday morning improved more than any spray I have bought.
The cleaner is already on the pad, so there is no bottle to grab
No squirting gel under the rim and hoping it clings. The pads come preloaded with cleaner, which means the prep step is pulling one out of the box. I used to buy bowl cleaner and brushes as two separate items, and I was always out of one of them at the wrong moment. Now it is one Clorox box in the cabinet under the sink, and when the box is low I know it before I am standing over the toilet.
You clean standing up instead of crouching over the bowl
The wand has a long handle, 16.81 inches on the whole unit, and that is enough that I am not folded over the bowl with my face a foot from the water. I am 52 and my knees have opinions about tile floors. I can reach the water line and the underside of the rim without kneeling. That sounds like a small thing until you have cleaned two bathrooms both ways in the same week.
Hard water and lime rings come off in fewer passes
We have hard water out here and the primary bathroom gets a mineral line at the water mark. I used to fight that with a stiff brush and a lot of scrubbing. The Clorox listing says the cleaning solution works on hard water and lime stains about twice as fast as a brush with manual cleaner, and my experience lines up with that. It is not a one wipe wonder. A thick ring still takes a second pass, but two passes beats ten minutes of scrubbing.
The label says it kills 99.9% of germs, and I stop wondering
The pads are labeled to kill 99.9% of germs, and I treat that the way I treat any label, as a claim from the maker rather than a promise from the universe. What I can tell you plainly is that the bowl looks and smells clean after one pass. Marcus is 16 and his aim is a work in progress, so that bowl gets cleaned more often than I would like. Two minutes and it is done.
No bleach smell hanging in a windowless bathroom
The pads are bleach free. Our hall bathroom has no window, only the exhaust fan, and anything with bleach in it sits in the air for an hour and gives me a headache. This has a rain scent that fades fast. I can clean that bathroom while Ray is at the mirror shaving and neither of us has to open a window that does not exist. For a small room, that is not a small detail.
Sixteen heads covered both bathrooms for about two months
The starter kit comes with one wand and 16 refill heads, 6 original and 10 rainforest rush. I use two heads a week, one for each bathroom, so the kit ran me close to two months. That is the number I write on the fridge list. I do not sit and count pads, I just noticed one week that I was down to the last few and added Clorox refills to the grocery order before I ran out mid clean.
It fits under the rim where the bristles never got
The head is a small flat pad rather than a fat bunch of bristles, so it slides under the rim. That is where the smell lives in my experience, not in the open bowl. It also gets down toward the trap without splashing water up onto the seat. I do the rim first, then the bowl, then the water line, in that order, and one pad holds up through the whole job.
Nothing to soak or sanitize when you are finished
With a brush, the job is not over when the scrubbing is over. You rinse the brush, you rinse the holder, you wonder whether either one is actually clean. With this, the pad goes in the trash, the wand gets a quick rinse and goes back in the cabinet. No soaking in a cup of bleach water on the floor. The whole routine got shorter at both ends, and that is what made me keep it.
It has survived three people and two bathrooms without cracking
This is the boring reason and it is the one that settled it. Three people, hard water, a teenager, a husband who works shifts and shaves every morning. The wand has been knocked behind the toilet, dropped on tile and used to reach the corner behind the tub. Nothing has cracked or rusted. The only thing I have had to rebuy is pads, which is exactly how a disposable system is supposed to work.
What I'd Skip
Two things I would not spend on. I would skip any separate wand holder, since the point is that the Clorox wand lives in the cabinet and nothing sits out on the floor. And I would skip buying a big refill pack before you know your own pace, because the 16 in the starter kit already told me how many weeks I get out of a box. I would also be honest about the limits. The surface recommendation is porcelain, so this is not a tool for tile, grout or a fiberglass tub. If you have a mineral ring that has been setting up for years, a stiff brush and a pumice stone still have a job on the first pass. And if there is no trash bin within reach of the toilet, you will be carrying a wet pad across the bathroom, so put a small bin next to it before you start.
Sixteen heads lasted me about two months across two bathrooms. The only thing I have reordered since is refills, and that is the whole review.
Put the brush in the bin and stop rinsing it out
One wand, 16 refill heads, cleaner on every pad. It is the same Clorox kit that has been in my cabinet for months, and the refills are the only thing on my reorder list.
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