Keepin’ Your Ride Immaculate: The Best Wheelchair Cleaning Techniques

The wheelchair may go down in history as one of the most useful gadgets ever created by man, beating out the car, the TV, even the electric drill. How come? It replaces the need for legs. When it comes to the higher purpose of a gadget, you can’t get anymore important than this.

And since it’s such a make-or-break device, keeping it in working order AND clean are of tantamount of importance, and ensure you have a ride you can count on. After all, without your legs what do you got? Keeping your wheelchair clean however definitely takes a bit of elbow grease.

The good news is that there are loads of tricks and gadgets to get it done, getting your wheelchair as sparkly white as possible (or sparkly gun-metal grey if that’s the color of your chair). Check the best of our wheelchair cleaning videos below.

Video #1: The Scrubber for Wheelchair Tires

While having a wheelchair that can traverse the outdoors is awesome, having dirty wheels is not. Unfortunately, dirty, muddy and caked-up wheels is part of the package when you take your wheelchair into the great outdoors.

Suffering from dirty wheels however that track dirt whenever you go inside is no longer something you must deal with. The Scrubber, a wheelchair tire cleaner from Inn2care (of company based in the Netherlands that also makes door openers), is a fully-automated wheelchair tire cleaner that turns on when you roll onto it.

The rolling motion activate a water sprayer, combined with two scrubbers that are automated, to get the job done. It’s quite ingenious rather (my mom would absolutely love this thing in the wintertime for when I come over).

Watch The Scrubber in action

Video #2: Handwashing Wheelchair Cleaning Tips

Our second video comes from the adorable Naomi Knight aka “Hot Wheels,” a T12 incomplete paraplegic who loves making videos showing how she does things. In her wheelchair cleaning video, she shows how she cleans her wheelchair from top to bottom using Clorox Green Works wipes, a cleaning agent she absolutely swears by.

Naomi actually hops onto her living room floor to clean her wheelchair, and takes each wheel off one by one to thoroughly clean it, making sure to get around the spokes and the hub. She also shows how she cleans underneath her foot plate.

Watch “Hot Wheels” made her manual wheelchair sparkling clean

Video #3: When in Doubt, Dump the Chair in the Pool

And our third video is on the fun side of things, coming straight from Jerry Diaz, a paraplegic from California. In his video, he shows how he quickly cleans his wheelchair after a long day at the beach and coming home with his chair full of sand.

Instead of wiping off his wheelchair crevice by crevice, which with beach sand could take eons, he goes the peerlessly easy route and just jumps in the pool while still in his wheelchair. Definitely not a stunt to be tried by anyone not able to swim on their own, you still got to love Jerry’s ingenious solution.

Watch Jerry throw himself into the pool

A clean wheelchair can have such an impact on how you’re viewed, and it can make you feel great in the process. Just make sure you don’t let too much time go by between cleanings. The more dirt and grime that gets built up, the longer it’ll take to clean.

When cleaning products do you use to clean your wheelchair?

Watch the videos

– The “Scrubber” wheelchair tire machine

– Tips from “Hot Wheels” on how she cleans her wheelchair

– Paraplegic cleaning beach sand off his wheelchair in a pool