Brush Hero Review: The Ultimate Water-Powered Wheel Brush (2024)

May 2, 2022May 26, 2016 by Chad Ina

For years,most of us have used the same detail brushes and wheel woolies to clean the wheels on our cars and trucks. And while this new tool may not replace our trusted mainstays completely, it’s pretty cool and fun to use.

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The Brush Hero is a new detailing tool that connects to a standard hose with water pressure alone powering its turbine, thereby spinning the detachable brush head—no batteries required. The tool is designed specifically to clean wheels and other hard-to-clean areas of a vehicle, but could clearly be useful in many other non-automotive scenarios.

Well-Built, Lots of Torque and No Gimmicks

The Brush Hero is lightweightat just 10 ounces, form-fitting and comfortable to use, albeit the tool does produce a bit of vibration in your hand. The non-slip grip handle has an on/off switch in just the right place for one-handed operation. It’s made of a hard plastic and feels quite rugged, too. The kit comes with two brushes—one for tougher jobs, another for more delicate surfaces—as well as plastic quick-connect hose adaptors (more on those in sec).

To be honest, we thought the Brush Hero was going to be gimmicky. There are so many larger water-powered car wash brushes that just don’t work at all. To our surprise, this thing really works well. We also thought it would stop spinning the minute we applied pressure, but we were wrong. The Brush Hero spins strong and only jammed on us once when we pushed the brush head a little too far into the wheel slots on our Jeep.

Rinse-n-Spin

While spinning, the Brush Hero also delivers a steady, light stream of water that spins with the brush—you will likely get a bit wet using this thing. That also means the toolrinses as it cleans so you’re not churning dirt and debris like sandpaper into the surface you’re cleaningwhile self-cleaning the brush at the same time.

The plastic-like brushes are tough, too, but soft enough not to scratch the surfaces they’re meant to be used on (again, the included black brush is softer, designed to be used on more delicate surfaces). We didn’t experience any fraying at all after cleaning nine wheels, multiple old hand tools and a moldy patio chair. This thing just worked.

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More Soap Please!

Thebiggest downside of the Brush Hero: it doesn’t use soap effectively at all. Because the unit rinses as it spins, any soap on the non-absorbant brushes will just fly off. So you’ll want to spray down your wheels with your favorite cleaner first versus simply dipping the Brush Hero into your wheel cleaning bucket. Even with just water, though, the Brush Hero will remove light residue quite well.

We should note that while we don’t have one yet, the company has just released a device called the Soap Star, which is a soap dispensing hose attachment with seven spray patterns that also works with the Brush Hero. Cool.

Hero Tips

1. After spraying down your wheels with your favorite wheel cleaner or soap, start cleaning with the Brush Hero from the bottom of the wheel up. This way, the Brush Hero won’t rinse all of the soap off the wheel.
2. Also, for us, ashorter hose equaled more spinning power. We used a 25′ hose and the Brush Hero was easier to stall when getting into the smaller slots of the Jeep’s wheels (pictured above) than with a shorter hose, which basically never stopped spinning.

Another slight issue is that most folks wash their car with one hose, so a good quick-connect with a water-stop feature will help when switching between your favorite hose nozzle and the Brush Hero, and will do so without having to turn off the water. The unit we received does have a plastic quick-connect that shuts off water flow when changing between the Brush Hero and our spray nozzle, but it constantly kept popping off—constantly.

Multi-Use Tool

As mentioned above, the Brush Hero could certainly be used for other projects. We tried it on a dirty patio chair with solid results. We also cleaned off some old hand tools, just to see what it could do. Remember, this was designed for detailing, so don’t think you’re getting a Dremel here—it’s not going to strip paint. And we’d be pretty worried if it did, given what it’s designed to be used on.

The Brush Hero is a new product launched with the help of the Amazon Launchpad program, which helps startups get their products in front of the millions of Amazon customers. The tool retails for around $25, which is a tad on the high-end for us but we still dig it, and is available online only at this time.