Grouting between tiles leaves a beautiful, lasting, and durable effect that many homeowners like. However, cleaning grout when it gets moldy, dirty, or discolored is an enormous pain! If you’re curious about how to clean floor grout without scrubbing, the answer is that there’s no way to eliminate the scrubbing completely.
However, there are several ways to make it easier! Many of us are used to getting down on our hands and knees and scrubbing away at the grout to get it looking shiny and new again. Believe it or not, this isn’t the only or even the best way to get your grout nice and clean!
By formulating the right cleaner, you can get your grout mostly bright and fresh while leaving the compound itself to do most of the work. There’s no way to get your grout 100% clean without even a little bit of scrubbing, but the techniques in this article will help you do it with minimal effort.
To answer the question of how to clean floor grout without scrubbing, we’ll go over the best cleaners for your grouted tile as well as a few easy techniques for getting them nice and clean.
Cleaning Floor Grout without Scrubbing
The secret to how to clean floor grout without scrubbing is the cleaner! Different DIY cleansers work well for various tasks, grout types, and stains.
Because grout is a sand-like compound, it’s especially susceptible to stains, mold, and soap scum. Many sites recommend cleaning your tile often to prevent these stains in the first place, but if you forget, the following cleaners should work well for you!
Try one of our floor tile grout cleaner recipes to see if it works well for you. If not, try another. We have several options from which you can choose.
Easiest Way to Clean Grout without Scrubbing: Peroxide and Baking Soda
The easiest way to clean grout without scrubbing (or with minimal scrubbing) is with a homemade recipe or descaler. We’ve found a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and baking soda often works best. These two ingredients combine to form a potent foaming mixture that polishes away stains and brightens the grout in one step.
For this recipe, mix the baking soda, peroxide, and dish soap and spread onto the stained grout. Let the mixture stay in place for at least ten minutes, then scrub gently until any discoloration starts to fade.
You can adjust the amounts of the above, too, if you don’t need quite that much. As long as you mix equal parts baking soda and peroxide, you’ll end up with a powerful and effective cleaner. Adding Dawn dish soap to the mix is not required, but it’s an excellent choice for kitchens or any place that gets exposed to grease.
Baking soda is a handy cleaner for grout because it gives the soap a gritty sort of texture. This helps to polish away any stubborn dirt stuck in your grout.
Sometimes, this is the only way to polish the worst stains from dirty grout lines. Use this mixture to clean grout haze from tiles, too. It has multiple bathroom and kitchen applications.
Vinegar and Citrus Gentle Grout Cleaner
We’re all familiar with the potent effects of combining vinegar and baking soda from our younger days in school. This same volatility can be utilized to polish and lift away stains from grout lines, too! We’ve even made several other articles on cleaning floors with vinegar because of its incredible versatility.
For this tile cleaner, mix the warm water, baking soda, lemon juice, and white vinegar in a spray bottle, and spritz the solution onto the dirty grout. Let the mixture sit for at least an hour.
Scrub the grout gently afterward (you shouldn’t need much elbow grease), and most dirt and grime should lift away. This is by far the easiest way to remove mortar from a tile, as well.
Vinegar isn’t the most potent household cleaner available, but it is useful and relatively gentle, as well as being extremely affordable. While you never want to use vinegar on natural stone tiles, ceramic tile and most other floor tiles are safe.
The Most Powerful Grout Cleaner: Clorox Bleach
If you’re looking for a potent cleaning agent for your grout, bleach or oxygen bleach is the best cleaner for grout in terms of raw power alone. However, bleach is a harsh cleanser, both on you and your tiles. We don’t recommend using it often, but it’s a great way to revitalize bathroom tiles that have been neglected or plagued by stubborn stains and build-up.
To use chlorine bleach or OxiClean to clean epoxy grout, take the undiluted compound, apply it to the dirty grout, and wait. Don’t leave the bleach on the tile too long; you don’t want permanent damage done to your grout, but the longer you leave it, the less you will need to scrub.
While bleach isn’t necessarily a no-scrub cleaner, it is the most powerful of the ones we feature here, so it’s the closest to a no scrub grout cleaner you will find! Note that we recommend using oxygen bleach before trying chlorine bleach, as it’s a bit gentler.
Also, be sure to ventilate your area well by opening windows and turning on fans before using bleach of any kind, and always use proper skin and eye protection!
Store-bought Grout Cleaner: Alkaline Cleaners
Alkaline cleaners typically involve manufacturer-formulated cleaning solutions that are specially made for cleaning the grout of mold and mildew. Any cleanser marketed towards bathroom grout cleaning should be sufficient for this purpose.
For chemical cleaning products, the cleaning process varies depending on the product, so always follow the manufacturer’s diluting and usage instructions printed on the bottle. Depending on the product, alkaline cleaners can also be questionable for human health, so be sure to follow all instructions regarding bodily protection before using these cleaners.
Of course, we recommend always using proper protection with cleaners of any kind, regardless of whether you made it yourself or not! It’s also smart to have a scrubber on hand like an old toothbrush, bristle brush, scrub brush, or a specially-made grout brush.
The No Scrub Grout Cleaner Secret: Sealing Your Grout
The best way, hands-down, to guarantee not needing to scrub your grout and tiles is to seal your grout well and often with grout sealer. While some cleaners do more for cleaning your grout than others, the day has not yet come that grout can be thoroughly cleaned by cleaner alone; for now, we must do a bit of scrubbing.
Until that day comes, the compounds and cleaning tips listed here should clean tile grout of all kinds, whether it’s white grout, colored grout, floor grout on tile floors, or wall grout on shower walls.
When your cleaning process is complete, always finish by rinsing or mopping the tile with water and then drying it thoroughly.
Did you like this list of tips and recipes for cleaning floor grout? If you can use this grout cleaning information, share this grout stain removal guide on how to clean floor grout without scrubbing with your friends or family on Facebook or Pinterest.