Boat Cleaning: How to Clean Vinyl Seats [VIDEO]

Video Transcription

How's it going everyone, testing out two new products from the company, Better Boat. This is the same company that reached out to me about their deck cleaner. I have a product review of this and it'll be linked up over here so you guys can check that out. This is an amazing deck cleaner. We actually took the boat out this weekend and you wouldn't believe how clean the deck is still after using it, but you use the boat all day. We went fishing, came in and out of the boat, walked all around, had food and stuff in the boat and the deck still looks white. It's absolutely amazing. There's something in that that keeps it white. It cleans it so darn well too. So definitely check out that product. And I'll also have links in the description to all the products I'm using this video.  

And then so the products that we're actually testing out today. First is the mildew and stain remover right here. So this product is meant to be a heavy duty cleaner. It says on that it effortlessly cuts through mildew and boat seat stains. I don't know about you guys, but we live in the Northeast and there's always mildew on our boat. No matter what. We leave out in the winter to come back in the spring, there's mildew, mold, everything. It always gets in here, no matter how many times I clean it. So we're going to test out that on some of the seats because some of our seats are very dirty because we're just starting to use the boat. The season's really just starting for us up here. So I'm going to follow it up with their leather cleaner and conditioner right here. It says leather but it says in the instructions on the back, you can use that on a any soft surface you have.

So we're going to test out both these products. Try to give you guys the most honest review I possibly can and then you guys can see the results and judge for yourself.

I additionally just want to mention a couple of products that I'm going to need in addition to use these. So right here I just have, this is a leather brush that I bought off of Amazon. It's a color lock brush right here. The camera will focus on that. So I use that. It's just a medium stiffness bristle. I use it for leather on cars. I have a magic eraser just in case and the Better Boat company actually has scuff pads too, that's probably worked better than this. This is only for heavy duty cases, not going to have to use this all the time. I have some paper towels to remove the product. And then for the leather cleaner I have a nice soft microfiber towel to buff it off. And then finally high have some rubber gloves because I don't want any chemicals drying out my hands. I use that for pretty much everything and car detailing, boat stuff, anything. I just always wore rubber gloves. It's a safe thing to do.

So this is the cushion I'm going to be testing on. This is going to be the before side over here and then this will be the after side. I put it on the grass just simply so you have better light because the boat was getting a little bit shaded. Now everything's all the same lighting throughout. So I'm going to be going ahead and cleaning this side here and I'm going to leave this side completely the same and we'll take off the tape and see what the results are.

The product says to spray it on, let it sit there until the stain removes and then it's a scrub if necessary. And then rinse off with fresh water. What I'm going to do is I'm going to spray it on, I'm going to scrub it, I'm going to let it sit for a little bit to work and I'm going to scrub it because this is pretty hard dirty. And I'm actually going to remove it with a paper towel, I'm going to wipe it off. And I'll probably rinse it off with fresh water after that just to get any residual cleaners off. But I find that wiping with the towel works a little bit better than just rinsing it off. I'm sure in most scenarios, if your seats aren't this dirty, you can just spray it on, let it soak and then rinse it off. But I think these are the extreme case we're going to have to brush it and scrub it off a little bit. So I'm going to go ahead and spray this on now.

Make sure it's set to stream, just spray on. I'm just going to do a section at a time. So I'm going to do the white section first because it's pretty sunny out and hot, so I don't want the product to dry. So I'm going to let it sit there and I'm going to start scrubbing.

Okay, so I have a little bit of a tough spot there that's pretty caked in. So I'm going to take my cleaner to spray directly on my magic eraser here or any scuff pad you have. Then I'm going to try to get that off. There you can see that it came right off. And now before this dries, I'm just going to take a paper towel and rub off any excess. Look how much dirt came off. Just not one pass there. That was only the first pass. So what I'm going to do something to do is I'm going to go over it. Hit any spots I think I missed and then I'll come back.

Okay, so I just cleaned up a little bit in the corners and stuff around here and a little bit up over here where I missed a little bit. Now I'm going to go ahead and clean the gray part of it, just using the same technique. It's also important to know it's probably better to do this in the shade but I needed some good light to film. Because the seat's really hot right now, these gloves are super hot to wear too. So definitely recommend doing it in the shade so the product doesn't dry on you while your using it, because you don't want dry product stains of any product. It's like if you cleaned your glass and the Windex dries on the glass, it doesn't look good. So probably recommend doing this in the shade.

I just go ahead and sprayed some on there. Going to take my same little leather brush here, I'm just going to scrub it. I'm just going to go ahead and take another clean paper towel and rub. Look at that. That's with one pass of the cleaner on a paper towel. Look how darn dirty that seat is. You can already tell a difference. So I'm going to do now is I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to go back, finish cleaning up, and then we're going to rinse it off with some water just to make sure there's no remaining chemical on here that could potentially harm the seat because that's what the instructions say to do.

I'm going to go ahead and apply the leather conditioner onto the seat and then we'll pull the tape off and see the results. Now that I went back and checked to see if this was clean and both of these sections were good, I have a wet paper towel here. I'm going to go ahead and just wet down the whole surface and wipe off any extra of the mildew cleaner. That's what the instructions say to do and you can see there are a couple little bubbles here. There's probably a little bit of cleaner left on because just pulling it off with a paper towel doesn't necessarily get everything, so it's good to make sure you get all that off. Yeah, you can see these bubbles here and stuff. I'm just going to take a clean paper towel, go ahead and wipe off and dry off the surface.

Now the surface is completely clean, completely dry, we followed the instructions for the most part. And we're going to go ahead and use the leather cleaner and conditioner because with leather, vinyl, anything like this, it needs to be protected because the sun, the UV rays can really weather it and you really want to have some sort of oil or something in there that'll keep it nice and soft and supple. Otherwise it'll start to crack. So that's what we're going to test and see if this does, because this is not the soft... It's in the sun right now, so it's kind of soft. But we're going to follow the instructions here and see how this performs.

So what it says to do is to thoroughly spray the area to be treated. And then we already have a clean surface. So we're good there. And then it also is okay to clean off any light dirt and debris with a brush. But we're not going to do that because we already have a clean surface. So we're going to go ahead and spray a liberal amount on, let it sit, and then we're going to buff it off with a microfiber towel.

I'm just going to go ahead and use my hand to rub it in a little bit to even it out. Another good reason to have the gloves on. So now it says to just let this sit like a wax or some sort, and we'll buff it off. I have a microfiber towel here that we're going to go ahead and use to clean off the seat.

So it took about two minutes or so for this to dry off. And now I'm just going to go ahead and take my microfiber towel and I'm going to buff off the surface, just like the instructions say to do.

Definitely see a little bit of dirt, definitely can't see on the camera, but a little bit of dirt coming off still. So it does have a little bit of cleaning agent in there, just not nearly as strong as the mildew cleaner. That's definitely their heavy duty cleaner.

That's definitely enough buffing. So we got the leather cleaner and conditioner on there and now it's going to make this vinyl seat a lot more supple and it's going to protect it from UV rays, which is super important to not have it fade. This boat's 2005, so it's definitely a little bit faded, but we don't want it to get any worse than it is. This white's pretty darn white. And now I'm going to do everyone's favorite part, we're going to go ahead and remove the tape and see the before and the after.

So, that's pretty night and day. You can see right here we have the before and over here we have the after. Look at the difference in the whites. I'm going to change the exposure. My camera is a little bit letters that just so you can see a tiny bit. But even up here look at the night and day difference there. Something really important to note too when you're looking at seats and cars or leather, vinyl, whatever you're looking at is if it looks shiny, see here looks shiny and greasy a little bit and this just looks like a nice flat white. This is a nice flat gray-ish brown. Whenever it looks flat that means it's clean. So this looks good to me. This over here, this section, this looks shiny and kind of gross. So that's just a good telltale sign it this is fully clean.

I'm also super impressed with this. I've tried multiple different products to clean this and I have never gotten anything nearly that distinct, so I would definitely recommend these two products right here. We got the mildew stain remover from Better Boat. It's the premium boat care. And we have the leather cleaner and conditioner. Both of these products have been excellent. I tested them before I did it on camera too to see how they performed and the deck cleaner that goes along with these is also fantastic.

After testing the mildew and stain remover and the leather seat conditioner, I can definitely say I would give both these products an A rating. They're excellent products, really reasonably priced too for when you consider what you're getting. And to help you guys out even more. The company left me a discount code, it's betterboat15 and that works on Amazon or on their website, thebetterboat.com. And I will have links in the description for you to go to their website and to the Amazon link. So if you guys click on those, it helps me out a little bit too.

And finally I want to say again that this is a small company they've only started up I think it was about a year ago, not too long ago. And they're very committed to customer satisfaction. So if you guys end up buying a product from them and you're not satisfied, give them a call. And they have a no questions asked, a hundred percent money back guarantee. Because they're an American based company, you're going to get good customer service. I cannot say enough about how good these products are. Full disclosure though, I did get these for free but I would definitely go with my own money and buy these.

I haven't found any product for our boat that works nearly as good as anything I've been using here. I've tried a couple of sea cleaners, sea conditioners, I've tried a deck cleaner. Nothing really seems to work as good as this stuff has and it seems to offer protection. I'm just very impressed. This is definitely something you want for your boat because your boat's an investment and you want to protect that investment. And cleaning it, you want the right tools for the job and these are the right tools for the jobs, so definitely recommend them. Don't forget to check out my other video of how to clean the deck with the Better Boat deck cleaner. And finally, thank you guys for watching. I really appreciate the support I've been getting lately. And take care and have a great day.

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