Muc-Off Bottle For Life Bundle

The Muc-Off Bottle For Life Bundle is a great way to keep your bikes clean and reduce your impact on the environment. The aluminium bottle is tough, with a silicone base to help protect it, and the Punk Powder does a good job of de-mucking your bikes. Unfortunately, as seems to be the case with many eco-friendly products, you do pay a bit of a premium.

If you take pride in cleaning your bikes regularly but worry about the waste, this Bottle For Life Bundle might be just the ticket.

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Compare it with, for example, Muc-Off's Nano Tech Bike Cleaner. We've tested the Nano and it works well at getting through grime, but if you go through a lot of it, there's a fair amount of waste involved: not just the plastic container when you purchase it, but the issue of environmental transportation costs if you go for the 5L refill to reduce the packaging, or you can buy it as a concentrate in a 500ml pouch, which makes 2L.

With this eco-friendly Punk Powder, two tiny sachets make 2L of bike cleaner. The packaging is compostable (Muc-Off says two sachets is a 92% reduction in packaging over the Nano Tech stuff), the ink on the packaging is vegetable, and the powder itself is plant-based – so vegan, and therefore cruelty-free. The box housing both sachets is also FSC recycled cardboard.

And of course the aluminium bottle can be reused indefinitely, its bottom protected by the non-toxic, food-grade silicone base.

Whether the trigger spray will last a lifetime is hard to say – in my experience, you'll see a couple of years before something breaks – but it might prove me wrong.

Punk Powder

Muc-Off says Punk Powder, when dissolved in water, is just as effective as Nano Tech and safe on all parts and surfaces, so it won't harm crucial components like seals, cables and brake pads.

Indeed, when I tried it out the results were pretty much as I expected. I'd been testing a new set of carbon wheels and brake pads on my Condor Italia RC, and within the first 100 miles, during the initial bedding in of the pads, they, the callipers and surrounding paintwork got caked in dust. I left this to sit on the bike for a week before attempting to clean it off.

To dissolve the powder, just fill the aluminium bottle with luke-warm water, pour the sachet of powder in, screw on the spray trigger and give it a good shake for about 30 seconds.

First up, I sprayed it on the caked-on brake dust, left it to work for a few minutes, and then used the shower setting on my garden hose to rinse it off. The majority of the dust had been removed, with only a tiny bit on the brake pad remaining; this eventually came off with a bit more Punk Powder and a soft bristle brush.

On other areas of the bike it worked equally well at removing grime, although as with most cleaners of this ilk, you'll either need to scrub hard or get something more powerful to cut through oily gunk. That's perfectly acceptable.

Bottle

The aluminium bottle itself feels great. It's slightly weightier than a plastic bottle and feels built to last, without deforming in any way or discolouring. The silicone base is a nice idea too; it not only helps protect the bottle from getting dinged when in use, it also helps the bottle stand up securely, especially on uneven ground. Personally, I didn't like having the base on while in use, as it made the whole bottle very heavy to hold.

The spray trigger is the same as you get with the Nano Tech cleaner. I have to admit I've never been a massive fan of this kind of spray trigger on the Muc-Off bottles. I tend to find it quite hard work to saturate a bike with the spray – there's not a load of throughput. It has a dual-action cap that you flip to change the spray from narrow to wide; I prefer the kind with a rotating adjustable nozzle at the end, so you can fine-tune the spray type.

Value and conclusion

Overall, the Bottle For Life Bundle is a really great idea – I love the environmental credentials – but it comes at a premium. You can buy the 5L bottle of Nano Tech for £29.99, which works out at about £6 per litre, whereas the Punk Powder is about £7.50 a litre.

Muc-Off isn't the first company to try to reduce its carbon footprint. Proper Cleaner by Guy Martin's Proper Degreaser Starter Pack, for example, consists of a plastic bottle and two sachets to make 2L of its degreaser, while its General Cleaner Starter Pack, which we tested back in 2018, consists of a bottle and a sachet that makes 1.5L of cleaner, for £6.50.

> Read more road.cc reviews of cleaning products here

Of course, if you already have an old plastic bottle to hand you could just use that and buy the Punk Powder sachets instead. The aluminium bottle and silicone base are a nice touch, definitely, but reusing an old bottle is arguably better for the environment.

Verdict

Good bike-specific cleaner with great environmental credentials, but it's expensive