Evaluating the Scrubbing Bubbles Automatic Shower Cleaner

I'll admit it. I hate cleaning. Well, that's not exactly true. I can tolerate cleaning up after myself. But I really, really dislike cleaning up after other people. Geez, here I am, three or four sentences into what's supposed to be a review of a product, and I'm already going off some irrelevant tangent. Too bad, it's my blog, so you'll have to tolerate it for a bit. Anyway...

One thing I'm not wild about cleaning is my shower. Unfortunately, my shower is a high-moisture, low-light area, so mold and mildew tend to accumulate relatively quickly. I've tried all kinds of tricks to reduce the frequency of cleaning, but nothing's really worked.

-I don't like the idea of running a squeegee over the walls immediately after a shower. Why would I clean a shower before I finish cleaning myself?

-I tend to forget to spray the stuff after I shower.

-And once I've left the bathroom, cleaning is out of the question.

As a result, I've come to the realization that every few weeks, I'm going to need to scrub down my shower stall. But being a procrastinator, this turns into a quarterly job, which of course makes the clean-up all the nastier and more time-consuming.

Enter the Scrubbing Bubbles Automatic Shower Cleaner. The commercial shows a woman happily pushing a button, and the animated bubbles scrubbing the shower surround, leaving a tub so clean that it's almost like staring at the sun. I'm kind of a skeptic, so Dow's marketing department set themselves up for failure on this one... big time.

When I bought and installed the shower cleaner, my shower was already dirty and slimy. The fact is, I was hoping that I'd install the shower cleaner, push the button once, and the shower would be all bright and shiny clean when I walked in the next morning. I didn't EXPECT this result, but I did HOPE for it. Alas, my hopes weren't fulfilled.

But the packaging DID lead me to believe that running one full bottle of the cleaner, over its natural course, WOULD slowly but effectively clean the shower. Alas, that also failed to happen.

In fact, my first impression of this product was so dismal that I was having a hard time deciding whether to try taking it back, or to just smashing the piece of crap with a sledgehammer. But please, don't take this as my final review... stick with me. This story has a happy ending.

But like any good story, there must be trials and tribulations for the hero to overcome. such is the case here. In my specific instance, there were two things about the shower cleaner that I just hated...

-The first thing I hated was the abysmal battery life. And when I say "abysmal," I am not exaggerating... The day I bought the cleaner, I put four newly-charged AA batteries in. Within three days, the batteries were too weak to power the cleaner.

-The second thing I hated was how quickly I chewed through the bottle of cleaner. I should clarify on this one... the cleaner has two buttons... one for every day cleaning, and one for cleaning up bigger messes. I used the buttons a lot... each time I changed out the batteries... after every shower... and I ALWAYS used the heavy cleaning button. I plowed through the first bottle of cleaner in less than a week, and my shower was still grimy.

After this week, I had gone through two sets of rechargeable batteries, one bottle of cleaning solution, and my shower was still icky. Now you can see why I was frustrated and ready to toss this piece of crap into the garbage. But I am, if nothing else, a tinkerer at heart. I like knowing how and when things work, and how and when things fail to work. So I didn't give up.

With this tinkering mentality, I had two suspicions. One was that alkaline non-disposable batteries might work where rechargeable batteries failed. So I ditched the rechargeable batteries and installed a set of alkalines. I am happy to say that the alkaline batteries are working like a charm after several weeks of daily use.

The second thing I did was clean the shower and start from scratch. While the automatic shower cleaner failed to prevent me from having to scrub the shower clean, I will report that when I finally broke down and scrubbed my grout and tiles, it was a breeze. Using just a water-dampened scrubbing brush, I had my shower clean in less than five minutes. So it didn't exactly "clean" my shower, but it did make life simple when I finally did so. Furthermore, since the shower has been clean, I've been using the daily clean setting, which has dramatically slowed the rate at which my cleaning solution is depleted, AND my shower is staying pretty clean. Perfect? No. But it is a lot better.

So, at the end of the day, I will give the Scrubbing Bubbles Automatic Shower Cleaner a qualified thumbs up. I say "qualified" because there are a couple of things that consumers need to bear in mind when purchasing this product...

-You need to use non-rechargeable, alkaline batteries.

-You need to start out with a clean shower.

-This device will not make it so that you never again need to scrub your shower. What it WILL do, however, is significantly reduce the frequency of your cleanings, and noticeably decrease the amount of labor required to clean the shower when it's time to do so.

If spending a little bit more money is worth saving a little time and labor, but this product.

**Updated July 5, 2012  After having the product in my home for about a year, I can no longer endorse this product.  I stopped using it a few months after this initial review because I ran out of the solution and didn't get around to cleaning for a while.  What did I notice?  Nothing.  Nothing at all.  With this in mind, I can no longer endorse this product.