When you are ready to clean your grout, of course you are going to need a brush to get the job done. When you go to a home improvement store to select your grout cleaning brush, you might be a little overwhelmed by all the choices available to you. There are a few brush characteristics that will make for better grout cleaning tools that you should try to find.
The first characteristic that you need to consider is the stiffness of the brush or what type of bristles it has. Brushes can be divided into three categories, soft, medium, or hard. The best type of brush for grout cleaning is a medium bristled brush. Soft brushes do not work well because you end up just pushing around the dirt on the surface and when you apply pressure, you bend the brush bristles rather than work them down into the grout to remove dirt. Soft bristled brushes might work if you clean your grout every day or once a week because the dirt worked its way very deep into the grout. Hard bristled brushes are a bad idea for grout because they can actually chew the grout up and remove pieces they are so hard. You only want to loosen dirt, not the grout itself.
The next characteristic to consider is the shape of the brush. In other words you need to look at the length of the bristles and how they are arranged on the brush head. Some brushes have all the bristles the same length for a flat brush. Others have a concave shape where the bristles on the outside are longer than the bristles on the inside. The shape that is best for grout cleaning is a convex or pyramid shaped brush. The bristles in the center should be longer than the ones on the edge. That will allow for the center bristles to scrub the grout and the outer bristles to carry the dirt away with your circular motions. One of the most helpful grout cleaning tips is to use circular scrubbing motions rather than back and forth motions so that the outside bristles can push the dirt the middle bristles loosened out of the way instead of working the dirt back in with back and forth motions.
The third thing you should consider about your brush is the handle. The worst part of grout cleaning is having to work on your hands and knees for long periods of time on the hard surface created by tile. It is very uncomfortable. Because of your discomfort, you may be tempted to get a long handled brush that you can use while standing up. The problem with this type of handle is that it is hard to get a circular motion. You are much better off if you have a shorter handle because you will have more control over the brushes movements. I tend to use two different styles of brushes when I clean grout. The first has a handle about two inches above the brush head that is attached by a small connection at one end like in the picture to the right. The other kind has no handle. Instead, I just hold the brush head. A brush like this is pictured above on the left. The reason I use both is because I use a different muscle in my forearm when I hold the two different brushes. That way, if my arm starts to get tired I can switch to the other brush and start sing a different muscle group until the other one recovers.