The Shopping List

There is a wide variety of cleaning products on the market – everything from all-purpose cleaners for home or boat use, specialty cleaners targeted to specific types of dirt such as mildew and black streaks and products that target specific surfaces or parts of the boat such as teak cleaners and bilge cleaners. For the purpose of this test, we focused on general boat soaps and all-purpose boat cleaners. We also included a few tried and true general cleaning products that we commonly see in the hands of boaters.

For general boat soaps we tested:

General All Purpose Cleaners tested:

Spray Cleaners we tested:

All 20 cleaners lined up on the transom of our dirtiest test boat. Click to see larger.

Buckets for mixing, water hoses for rinsing and a long line of cleaners ready for testing.

Test preparation included collecting as many buckets as we could find.