The Best Grout Cleaners To Refresh Your Tiles

HG's ready-to-use grout cleaner is the one in our testing photos, and it's the bottle we'd buy first for grout that's gone grey with everyday dirt. It comes in a 500ml trigger spray, so there's nothing to mix, and it works on both wall and floor joints.

HG's instructions are to spray it along the grout lines, work it in with a brush and rinse with clean water after approximately 15 minutes. On our test wall, a few passes with the brush were enough to bring the joints back to a much lighter colour, as the second photo shows. The catch is that the 500ml bottle doesn't go far, and we got through a lot of it during testing, so buy two if you've got a big tiled area.

LTP's Grout Stain Remover is the heavy-duty option here. It's mainly made to shift grout haze and cement residue from the face of newly laid tiles, but it also lifts deep-set dirt from the joints themselves and brings them back towards their original colour.

LTP says it's suitable for ceramic, porcelain and stone, indoors and outside, and it removes limescale as well as grout residue. It gets to work within five minutes, can be scrubbed into stubborn marks and rinses clear with water. The 1 litre bottle can be diluted for lighter jobs, which stretches it further. Because it's such a strong cleaner, test it on a hidden corner first, especially on natural stone or coloured grout.

If you're doing several bathrooms or a big kitchen floor, buying grout cleaner in small spray bottles soon gets expensive. Pro-Kleen sells its cleaner as a 5 litre container with a refillable 750ml spray bottle, and the brand describes the formula as highly concentrated, so that container should last a long time.

Pro-Kleen says the cleaner removes brown and black staining caused by mould, fungus and soap residue, and leaves a grease-free finish once it's rinsed. It needs 10 to 20 minutes to work, which is slower than Black Diamond but fine for a job where you're working across a whole room. The only downside is that you have to buy the big container, which is a lot of money upfront if you've only got one shower to clean.

Black Diamond's Ultimate Grout Cleaner is acid-free, so it's a safer choice for coloured grout that can fade with a harsher product, and the brand says it suits white and coloured joints alike.

It cuts through dirt, grime, grease and oil, so it's well suited to kitchen floors and splashbacks as well as bathrooms. Black Diamond says it gets to work in two to three minutes, far quicker than the other cleaners here. To get the best from it, you'll need to scrub it into the joints with a grout brush rather than just spraying and rinsing, as it relies on agitation to lift ingrained dirt.

Forever White works differently from everything else in this list. Rather than a spray that you rinse away, it's a thick, toothpaste-like reviver that you apply straight onto the grout lines with the built-in applicator, where it dries to a fresh white finish.

Because it sits on top of the grout, clean the joints first and let them dry, then run the applicator along each line. Everbuild says it covers up to 20 square metres, gives a waterproof finish and protects against mould, mildew and bacteria for up to 10 years. The applicator gives you neat control, but working along every joint by hand takes time, so it's at its best in a shower or splashback rather than a big floor.

Problem Solved is a fairly priced, British-made cleaner for keeping on top of grout between deeper cleans. The brand says it gets to work in under 10 minutes and removes dirt, mould and mildew, and it's suitable for both wall and floor grout.

You apply it with a brush or cloth, then leave it to work. It doesn't need hard scrubbing, but a light going-over with an old toothbrush or grout brush gets much better results on ingrained dirt than leaving it to work alone. It'll also bring back some of the whiteness to joints that have started to dull.