Product Review: Scrub Daddy

Scrub Daddy original

I kept seeing these cute little smiley face scrub sponges, the Scrub Daddy, on QVC, and wanted to know how well they worked but didn’t want to pay the shipping and handling fees since I already found my perfect scrubber in my favorite Spaghetti Scrub that I rave about in ‘My Favorite Cleaning Gadgets’ blog.

Well, didn’t they come out with a larger ‘brick’ version of the cute little smiley face, meant for bigger jobs called Scrub Daddy Heavy Duty? This was back at the end of winter/brink of spring and I knew my grill really needed a deep cleaning for the season. It was on a special one-time value and my mom said she’d split the pack of 5 with me, so why not?

The inventor of these was on that Shark Tank reality show, and these sponges are made from a special material that’s not supposed to scratch. What specifically caught my attention was he kept saying it was good on grills and grease. I then watched him clean a filthy oven with nothing but water, and it looked amazing.

The inventor and his invention...

Scrub Daddy Heavy Duty; one cut in half

It did scrub extremely well, I will not deny that by any means. And it did not scratch anything I’ve tried yet. However, the special material does NOT like grease whatsoever. I purchased a nice, used cast iron frypan at an estate sale that had been recently sandblasted and re-seasoned. Beautiful! (I have no patience with new cast iron so it is my new goal in life, to find nice, used pieces like this that are already broken in for me! :P) It was pretty clean, but of course I wanted to test out my new Scrub Daddy and see how much more grease it could pull off of this frypan. And it worked! Cold water, no soap, and it got a good little bit of grease off of the pan. (You can’t use soap on cast iron, remember, so another reason I wanted to try this.) After I was done, however, I couldn’t get the grease stain out of the sponge and it was literally the first time I used it. These are advertised as working and lasting for months. Hmm…

I tried another sponge on some old caulk that needed to come off the edge of my shower. For this task I used a bucket of cold water, the Scrub Daddy, and a paint scraper. I did get everything off, but I think the paint scraper did most of the real work. It was a tough call, but I was mostly annoyed that the Scrub Daddy wasn’t staying firm, as I felt like it would have done a better job if it had. They are supposed to stay firm in cold water for coarse scrubbing and soft in warm water for gentle. My experiences have all been that they are flexible in both warm and cold water, although it was a little more firm with the cold water than the warm.

Scrub Daddy Heavy Duty box front

The next thing I tried the Scrub Daddy out on was the car. It did much better than the soft sponge I have at getting the bugs off the front! That is one area I do recommend using it. I used cold water and Armor All Car Wash & Wax.

Alright, the time has come to try it on the grill. I have washed a couple of small grill baskets I put veggies into with the same sponge I used first on the cast iron skillet, so a little bit more grease has built up on it at this point. I’m really sorry I didn’t take a picture of it before using it on the grill because afterwards it had to go directly into the trashcan and I couldn’t touch anything because my hands were so caked in grease. So, yeah…again, the Scrub Daddy really did scrub most of the grease and grime off of the grill and grates. It just would NOT come off of the sponge, even using the ‘jet’ setting on my outdoor hose. And by the time I was done it was just pushing the grease around on both my hands and the grill so I did have to take an old Spaghetti Scrub and some paper towels out to finish the job. I have to say I have never gotten so much grease on myself scrubbing the grill before. And the Spaghetti Scrub or honestly, even the scrubby side of a regular sponge don’t collect grease like that until they are a bit more used and abused at the end of their life cycles.

My friend purchased the original Scrub Daddy (smiley face version) and really liked it for her dishes. She used it to peel zucchini (another thing they advertise about its scrubbing power is that it scrubs the skin off of your vegetables!) and said little pieces of zucchini are unfortunately now stuck in the sponge material that she can’t get out so she will not be using it for that again. You might be able to see in my picture the tiny flecks of white caulk that are stuck in mine.

Another thing I feel I should mention was that they advertise that you can cut the Heavy Duty “bricks” in half. One of the sponges I immediately did so with because I was splitting a set of 5 with my mom, so we decided to split the 5th one literally in half. Well, there was a huge air bubble in the middle, so the sponge was going to break down faster than normal. Luckily QVC’s  customer service took care of it and sent me a new one immediately. Let’s hope you’d get that same service if purchased elsewhere, too!

Back of Scrub Daddy HD box

My overall feeling is that if you don’t have access to the Spaghetti Scrub (I did see these at World Market!!) and you do have access to the Scrub Daddy, I would totally go for it. Their site says they are sold at Bed Bath & Beyond, Walmart, and a few other retailers. I would think it would be great to use the same way that I already use my Spaghetti Scrub on the dishes, and I think it would also be good for cleaning soap scum in the tub. Like I said before, I also liked it on the bugs on the car!!

I would just make sure to keep the Scrub Daddy away from anything that has any amount of grease on it, particularly from a grill. I am curious to hear if the original one works any better than the large one since they are supposed to be the same, and I also wonder if the grease inside of the oven will do the same as the items that had grill grease since I watched him clean the oven on TV with no problem!!! Looking at the Heavy Duty product description on their website I now see in parenthesis “solvents, grease, oils and other substances may resist rinsing”. Ugh!

Have you tried the Scrub Daddy? Which one? What do you like to use it on? Did you have any grease troubles like me?!