Cleaning your car’s floor mats can be a pain. Sometimes, you spend ages vacuuming and you just can’t seem to get everything off. Often, little bits of plant matter or grit get tangled in the fibers and even a powerful vacuum won’t suck them up. Sure, you could spend ages plucking at your floor mats with a pair of tweezers, but who has the time? Surely, there’s a better way, right?
Enter the powered toilet brush. Shared widely on TikTok and Twitter, the concept is simple. You cut off a toilet brush so that its handle is a short stub, and you put it in the chuck of a power drill. Then, all you have to do is pull the trigger and drag the toilet brush across the mats until they’re clean.
Having seen this, I had to try it for myself. I’ve spent ages trying to clean floor mats with all kinds of methods. I’ve tried soap and water and lots of scrubbing, I’ve tried my home vacuums, and I’ve used those giant ones at the DIY car wash, too. Nothing does a very good job of freeing up all the tiny little bits of debris. None of these methods has proven very successful. I figured I’d head out, buy a toilet brush, and give this method a whirl.
Normally when you see life hacks they're usually more effort or less effective than the conventional way, but once in a while a gem comes along
– courtesy of @that40yearguy #WeirdCarTwitter pic.twitter.com/RAXlYMMjqT
— Trinity G Francis (@TrinityGFrancis) February 26, 2024
The results look amazing, right? Clean floor mats in minutes, and you don’t even need a vacuum cleaner.
Building your own is pretty easy to do. Ideally, you’d spend $2 on a cheap toilet brush, but I got stuck spending $15 of the King’s Dollars because Australian supermarkets suck. Anyway, I then set about hacking it shorter with a Stanley knife before I whittled down the handle small enough to fit in the 13 mm chuck of my Ryobi brushless drill.
So far, so good. I now had something that looked like a prop from a deleted scene in an Austin Powers movie. All I needed now was a set of dirty floor mats.
There was just one problem. In recent years, I’ve been inspired by my friend Alexei. He fastidiously cares for his vehicles, never leaving so much as an errant receipt floating around the footwell. He’s also a dab hand at restoring vintage motorcycles and has such an eye for detail that he repairs watches for fun. Following his grand example, I have started taking better care of my automobiles. Thus, my floormats were pretty clean. There’s an easy solution to that, of course.
This toilet brush thing is pretty cool. pic.twitter.com/hGIEfNGZYM
— Lewin S. Day (@rainbowdefault) February 27, 2024
With the floormats nice and filthy, I went ahead and tried vacuuming them clean. My vacuum isn’t hugely powerful, but it’s the kind of thing a lot of people have when they live in an apartment or smaller home. It does an okay job, but it really takes its time to clear an area. In contrast, the toilet brush is just a monster. For soil and random bits of leaf or tree, the brush just kicks them out of dodge. It’s like a kinetic weapon specifically designed for smacking errant particles out of a hard-wearing automotive carpet.
The toilet brush isn’t the be-all and end-all though. For the usual detritus that pollutes my floor mats, it’s killer. However, I also tried it with the very fine dust underlying the gravel on my driveway. For this material, the toilet brush did an alright job at bringing it to the surface while also generating a great cloud of dust. But, to a degree, it was also spreading it around the mat without removing all of it. Doing a second pass with the vacuum cleaner helped remove this one type of material; for everything else, the toilet brush alone was pretty much enough to do the job.
Not pictured earlier, but I put some very fine dust that was under this gravel on to the mat.
It looks like the brush is making the appearance worse, but I think it's actually raising it to the surface.
Coming in with the vac as a second step then clears it. pic.twitter.com/Ehpy06x7Lw
— Lewin S. Day (@rainbowdefault) February 27, 2024
It’s worth noting that some vacuums would work to clean a floor mat in a similar way, too. That is because some units have a powered spinning brush head that does exactly what the toilet brush is doing—using plastic bristles to literally knock dirt out of the fabric. However, those powered brush heads often have limited reach and penetration, and can’t deliver the raw power of a modern cordless drill. This thing is effectively pounding the mat, vibrating it and smacking out dirt and debris with great efficiency.
Ultimately, I reckon the toilet brush is now the gold standard for DIY cleaning your floor mats. If you’re not brushgitating (brush-agitating) your mats, you’re not seriously in the game. Give it a try and let me know what you reckon. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Image credits: Trinity G Francis via Twitter screenshot, Lewin Day
Detailers have been using brushes designed for this for a long time. I have a Chemical Guys brush designed specifically for upholstery that I bought several years back for ~10USD. It does work really well though
I use laundry detergent and a pressure washer, then hang out to dry.
Nice.
Yeahhhhhhhhhh Baby, YEAHHHHHHHHHH
Thanks, I was pretty happy with that one
Well, I feel stupid, I’ve been using my Floor mat brush to clean my toilet all these years….. 😉
I think they already make / sell powered toilet brushes for less than you paid for the manual brush alone.
OK, maybe not less (US ~$30), but can you put a price on not putting your drill in the toilet?
They do make specific drill brushes for less than the price of a $15 toilet brush.
The main thing I’ve seen as a miracle carpet cleaner is an orbital sander with velcro hooks attached to it. Hang up the mats and go ham, and watch the dust vibrate right out of it.
You can buy brushes for this purpose that cost the same as a toilet brush.
Well sure, but they’re not a toilet brush.
Anything’s a toilet brush if you try hard enough.
Wait… You guys brush your toilettes?
But then it wouldn’t be a “life hack”, it would just be buying the appropriate tool for the job, which is boring, and doesn’t get “views”.
My peasant-spec 2020MY car has neither floor mats nor cabin temperature control. Sad that this website has left me and my ilk behind.
Here in the land of winter, carpet floor mats get tossed immediately. Most new cars don’t even include them anymore, the dealers offer rubber all weather mats. Maybe some fancy-pants with a heated garage and chauffeur uses carpets, but I don’t think they are the audience for this toilet-brush intel.
The carpeted floor mats sit in the basement until I sell the car and then throw them in the trunk.
Fun fact: the box for Miata all-weather mats is so large that it does not physically fit in the car.
That gives me a flashback to my CompUSA days, and a guy in a Miata who stopped by our store to impulse shop. What did he choose? A 19″ Viewsonic CRT monitor. The monitor had to be removed from the box and strapped into the passenger seat because there was no other way it was going home with him (well, we would have delivered in in our van but that cost extra so he said no.)
Yep, can confirm. I worked in merchandise pickup at Montgomery Ward and I loaded many 25-36″ TVs into the front or back seats of cars because the box was too big to fit. I can remember at least 3 times when people bought a floor model lawn tractor. At least those folks had pickup trucks with big enough beds, but we still had to round up 4 people to help pick the tractor up off the ground and load it into the bed. I suppose we could have had them drive around to our loading dock, but I imagine the bed still would’ve been a few feet below the dock. Not sure if that would’ve been any easier.
The stock carpeted mats stay in their original plastic, stored somewhere in the car hole, and brought out again when it’s time to sell the car.
Indeed I have been lugging around a brand new set of Odyssey carpets since 2016, I should have said “tossed into the basement”
Same here. I have a gravel driveway. The cloth mats go straight into the box that my all-weather mats came in, and then get put back in the car at trade-in time. When I have used cloth mats in the past, I just take them to the self spray car wash and hit them with the pressure washer.
I bought a 6 year old 4Runner that came with a set of Weathertechs from the previous owner, the carpeted mats were in the cargo area looking like brand new. Those mats have been sitting in my spare room the past 5 years, still looking brand new.
I am in California and use all weathers and we just have rain. I prefer them now. The carpet mats shifted too much.
Doesn’t work on my genuine CocoMats which have deep gaps between the natural fibers. A good vacuum gets most of the debris while the weave and pattern disguises the rest.
Life goals right there.. Some cars just dont call for the CocoMats though. I’ll have to see if they make a set for my Ridgeline, hahhahaha.
They will custom fit anything. They’ll even send you a pattern kit. I do think the Ridgeline is a little outside the target audience though.
My next Cooper for sure, or one day the 944 S2.
Good choices for vehicles… and CocoMats.
Weather tech, spray down with tire cleaner, hose off, let air dry. Job done.
Powerwash > Done.
Or just, you know, use weathertech and keep the original floor mats in your basement until you go to sell the car.
Correction: More accurately, Keep the original floor mats in your basement until you go to sell the car, either misplace them or forget about them and stumble across them years later after the car is long gone…
I feel personally called out.
Yeah…. I may or may not have a collection of floor mats and rear-seat headrests from several cars I no longer own…..
don’t forget the retractable cargo cover. it’s in the same spot.
One step beyond that, I have both the Weathertech and factory floormats from my FR-S in my garage.
PS, if you have an FR-S and need these things, hit me up.
Twice I’ve done this. Never store anything you want to find again in the garage attic, mental note.
$15 for a toilet brush? Damn, I will move to Australia and open a Dollar store with cheap chinese stuff…
Question: for those BMW and Mercedes velour mats, would you think the brush could ruin them somehow? It doesn’t seem to be the case in the video, but what is the impression considering the long term?
And you are right, there are some vaccum cleaners that have a rotating brush. I have one, and the thing is powerful, maybe because is has a cord instead of a battery. It is strong enough to, if you are not careful enough, cause some damage to the carpet/mat.
Not sure about velour. These are just usual hardy carpet
Do you have to run the toilet brush in reverse since you’re down under? I’ll show myself out.
In the land where men chunder, I don’t know if they would call it reverse. Counterclockwise would be reverse in the northern hemisphere, but they probably call it forward.
Kind of like going out for Chinese food in China — they just call it food.
ha ha
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W24-sQcpgAw
You don’t have to hack up a toilet brush. You can buy the brushes that are made to fit a a drill for from amazon for $6. They also work great to clean wheels.
The best cleaner I know of is a machine that does pretty much this same thing but to the whole mat at the same time. They are at a few car washes around me. It’s a machine with a slot on the top (like a toaster) and opposing spinning brushes inside. You just feed the mat down into the slot and pull it out. Spin it around and put the other end down inside and pull it out. They come out spotless and it raises the nap real nice too. All the dirt falls out the bottom of the machine.
I’ve never seen one of these before, it sounds amazing
I worked at a full-service car wash as a kid and we had these, worked great.
I’ve also used the pressure gun at the self-service car washes on carpeted mats; works great but then you have wet floor mats for a while.
So, you’re next gonna duct tape a vacuum hose to the drill so it sucks up the dust as its beating it out?
I just use an upright vac on the floor mats. The brushes are built into the vac, as is the vacuum function.
I also have a small handheld corded vac with brushes (the cordless vac bush heads are not much help, IMHO) that works great for the floor mats and carpets installed in the car. It’s also great for carpeted stairs or upholstered furniture. I don’t think they make them anymore since everything has gone cordless, but they are still available used if you search for Royal Prince or Dirt Devil Plus.
(I have pets)
I do the same thing with an upright. I just lay them out on the ground pieced together as if they were one big rug then treat them as such. Takes no time at all.
I just smack ’em against the side of my house to raise the dirt, then vacuum them. Seems to work pretty well.
I usually yell at them while I do it too, and scream about their filthy ways.
Does it help clean them? No. But it makes me feel better.
Hey, we’re all Autopians here, we’re not going to kink shame you for that.
Thanks Geoff. You’re alright in my book.
Cleaning brushes like this for drills have existed for quite a while, and yes, some of them are dome shaped like a toilet brush. I wouldn’t say there’s a need to hack up a toilet brush.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/RYOBI-Scrubber-Accessory-Kit-11-Piece-A95SPBK223/322618923
As your testing showed, sometimes it will just fling the dirt further along the mat. Probably best to use a vacuum at the same time. If you want to get really fancy and have a source of compressed air, use a Tornador and a vacuum.
Why just buy the one you need when you can pay 5x more for a set of eleven?! Gotta say, the tool marketers know their consumers…
Top tip. Buy the drill brushes from Amazon. Then you don’t have to modify anything.
This is the sort of in-depth investigative reporting on important issues which brings me back to the site day after day.
-I always just hung them in the clips & sprayed the crap outa them when washing the car. But, even vacuuming them dry often left the car smelling mildew-ey for a day or 3, so this is definitely worth a try.
That’s how Red Green makes whipped cream.
Keep yer stick on the ice.
If the women don’t find you handsome, they should at least find you handy
Yes, but somewhere in all of this, we need to figure out where to include the handyman’s secret weapon — Duct Tape!
$15!!! Did you already have a toilet brush laying around you could use?
Slightly used.
Exactly;-)
That’s really only about $10 USD…
I just pressure wash everything I can remove from inside the car. This brush fix might be useful for loosening dirt and debris in the carpets. Still need to vacuum after, though. Hmm, a whirling toile brush with an attached vacuum …
Strap a cheap drill to your shop vac and have a brushed vacuum…or go get the one from your house
This, the Coin Op car washes even have “Mat Clips” on the wall so you can hang your mats to spray them out. One of the finer car washes in my area also has a compressed air sprayer with the vacuums to help blow the dirt loose as you vacuum.