Product Review: Kaboom Foam-Tastic with Oxi Clean

This past week, we've been doing a little deep cleaning in the apartment.  Specifically, I've been cleaning the grout in the kitchen (part of it anyway, we split it 3 ways) and the grout in the shower.  When I tried to clean what must have been years of black build up in the kitchen grout a couple of summers ago, it took TONS of elbow grease and bleach water, and I didn't get very far because I got pissed that it was so hard.  This time around, I wanted to try to "work smarter, not harder" so I took a trip to Walmart to see what I could find.  Enter: Kaboom.  I love their spray cleaner in the bathroom (so long as the windows are open: that stuff is POWERFUL), and so I decided to give their foam cleaner a try.  (Official Product Website)

The kitchen grout was AMAZING.  Spray it on, let it sit until it turns white (at a little longer, maybe 10 or 15 mintues), and then just a little scrub with a stiff-bristle cleaning brush and BAM the grout looks great!  With the exception of some cooking oil stains that have soaked into the grout, it's pretty dang clean.  All the surface gunk is gone.  And it was SO EASY (though be sure to wipe up with a damp rag after; wouldn't want that just hanging around to get on your bare feet...).  I've spent longer amounts of time brushing my teeth; each "section" (one end of a tile) took about a minute to scrub, so a 4x4 square takes about 12-15 minutes for all grout edges.  Not too bad.

The hard water in Pocatello is pretty bad, and we end up with orange hard water (or maybe mildew?) stains all over the grout in the bathroom.  Just going over the shower grout alone (not the tiles) and letting it sit for 10 or 15 mintues and then a quick scrub with my brush (maybe 5 minutes on that same 4x4 square), and the orange stains are.. way less.  Not gone.  Maybe if I spent more time scrubbing they would be, but in my experience it takes something pretty drastic (CLR anyone?) to really get Idaho hard water stains like that completely off, and I just didn't want to spend that much time in a rented apartment.  It did get rid of some of the other gross stuff too though, and I was overall really impressed by the major LACK of work on my part.

Overall rating, 8/10.  What did I expect from the same company that makes Arm & Hammer baking soda?  I would have given it a 10 in that it does what it's designed to do EXTREMELY well, but it also feels a little bit dangerous, though it's not terribly so (check out the Material Data Safety Sheet for details).  I mean, I wouldn't use it around very small children (let dad take them out for ice cream!) or in a daycare setting because Kaboom products in general pack a pretty powerful punch, but the smell wasn't too bad and it did a REALLY good job on the floors.  Plus, it didn't damage my rings (which I totally forgot to take off).  Don't use it around bleach though... not a good chemical mixture.