I Tried The Powered Toilet Brush Hack To Clean My Car’s Floor Mats

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