Green Oil Eco Rider Deluxe Set

The Green Oil Eco Rider Deluxe Set is a great buy – it's effective, environmentally friendly and well-specced for cleaning and maintaining your bike.

The set is sold as everything you need to keep your bike in peak condition while caring for the environment. In the past, it's often been the case that these sorts of products are either environmentally friendly or good enough to keep you bike in peak condition, but seldom both. Having tried out the Green Oil Clean Chain Degreaser recently and been very impressed by it, I have high hopes for this collection.

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In the box you get:

• Clean Chain Degreaser
• Wet Chain Lube
• Green Clean Bike Cleaner
• Ecogrease
• Ecorags (x2)
• Green Oil Bicycle Brush

Some of the eco-friendly elements are immediately obvious, with reused bottles being used throughout – the Green Clean Bike Cleaner bottle, for instance, with a Mountain Dew lid on it. And all the instructions tell you why everything is eco friendly. Even the container it comes in has an implicit apology for not being widely recyclable and instead there's a suggestion that you grow salad leaves in it when you've finished using it – and the seeds are included.

I tested the various elements out on my bike on the grass, and despite fully washing my bike twice in three weeks on the same spot, there is no evidence of any ill effect. Not exactly scientific, but I'm thinking if this stuff wasn't eco friendly, I doubt this would have been the case.

For everything else I can only really go on what Green Oil claims on the packaging, but given the effort that's been made elsewhere regarding reusable elements and minimising waste, I'm happy to accept that this is a genuinely eco-friendly product.

So, it appears to be very environmentally friendly, but does each element work?

First off, the Clean Chain Degreaser. I reviewed this on its own very recently, and it works very well. You can read my full review here, but in brief, its thick consistency coats the drivetrain well and does an impressive job of stripping dirt and grime off without doing any noticeable environmental damage.

The degreaser is actually Green Oil Green Clean in concentrated form. You get 200ml of it in the kit: one 100ml bottle to use as degreaser, and another 100ml at the bottom of a 1-litre bottle which you then mix with water to make Green Clean. This significantly reduces the weight of the kit and therefore the amount of CO2 to transport it – which seems a sensible decision.

Once diluted, the Green Clean sprays easily – an adjustable nozzle meaning it can spray as a stream or as a mist – and foams up well. James tested this a few years ago and thought it was excellent. To help it cut through the grime, you then need to give your bike a bit of a scrub and a wipe, so you aren't left with streaks, and so Green Oil has included two 'Eco Rags' which are literally rags from old clothes. I could write a more detailed review, but... they're rags, and you can wipe stuff off with them.

The set also contains a Green Oil Bicycle Brush – a stiff bristle brush with a wooden handle made with FSC certified wood. This has no plastic in it; instead it uses plant-based bristles which soften slightly in the wet and are very effective for getting into hard-to-reach areas like the intersection of the stays at the top and bottom.

When Shaun tested this some years ago he found the bristles a bit harsh on paintwork, but that wasn't the case for me – and the handle being wood also makes it difficult for that to damage or scratch your frame. The brush is expected to last for 10 years, too, which is impressive.

Once you've scrubbed, brushed, wiped and rinsed, the only thing left to do is lubricate and grease everything. For this, Green Oil has included its Chain Lube and Ecogrease.

Steve tested the lube back in 2018 and found that it lasted a long time, resisted dirt, and kept faff to a minimum – and this is pretty much exactly my experience. I applied this at the start of the month and after cycling about 100 miles a week, I only reapplied it because I had deliberately scrubbed it off.

In fact, it's almost too good – to completely remove it from the chain I needed to wash it two or three times.

As for the Ecogrease (which Shaun also tested back in 2016), it's worked well for everything I've used it on (including the hinges on my shed). It doesn't wash off easily, despite being biodegradable, and it's easy to apply from the tube, although you can also do so from a grease gun or similar.

I applied it to my Hunt wheelset, headset bearings and to some of the bolts that seize most commonly, and found it was still where I'd put it after a month.

Value

Given the quality of the products and the environmental credentials, the set's rrp of £64.99 seems reasonable.

We looked at the Muc-Off Dirt Bucket back in 2018, which has a couple more brushes and an additional lube, but has gone up in price to £84.99. According to Muc-Off it 'has a Project Green credential; meaning that it's either biodegradable, refillable, reusable, or all three!', but a lot of it is plastic and despite having that Project Green certification it doesn't have anything close to the same eco credentials.

Overall, I've been impressed with the Green Oil set. It has everything you need to keep your bike clean and performing at its best, all without damaging the environment.

Verdict

Environmentally friendly and also impressively effective