Juice Lubes Dirt Juice Boss in a Can Chain Cleaner

Juice Lubes Dirt Juice Boss In A Can is exactly that: the excellent Dirt Juice Boss degreaser, as an aerosol. If you're short on time and just need to give your drivetrain a quick blast then it's a useful thing to have in the shed, but it's an expensive and wasteful way of buying degreaser, and for nearly every task you're better off with a bottle.

First things first: Dirt Juice Boss is an excellent degreaser. When Adam tested it back in 2020 he gave it high praise, calling it 'Fast acting and extremely effective'. It's quite expensive at £14.99 for 500ml but because it's so powerful, you don't need much, and you can make it last. It's a biodegradable formula, too, so you don't have to be quite so worried about drips and spills when you're working.

The aerosol is a 400ml serving, pressurised and ready to spray onto your moving parts using a directional nozzle. At a tenner it's better value on paper, but the nature of an aerosol can means you use loads more, and loads more of it is wasted: hitting things you didn't want it to, and flying past your bike into the shrubbery. Just as well it's biodegradable.

The power of the aerosol spray and the efficacy of the degreaser itself mean that this can is super handy for some specific tasks. It's ideal for loosening oily crud in hard-to-reach areas: blasting it out of brake and mech pivots, for example. Also, if you've pulled your bike out of the shed just before a ride to find the drivetrain's a grubby mess then you can give it quite an effective clean, quite quickly, by backpedalling and blasting the chain and cassette at close quarters.

I'd estimate from my use that you've got about five goes at that before the can runs out, so a couple of quid a go. Realistically, you need to be pretty time pressed for that to be a good spend of your money and use of the world's resources. But hey, we've all been there.

Juice Lubes' own instructions suggest you're going to be spraying this on components, letting it work for half a minute, then scrubbing it off and washing. If that's your workflow, you want the bottle of degreaser, and a brush. Not this. You'll use loads less and it'll be just as effective.

So should you buy it? Well I don't use a spray degreaser much but I've generally got one in the shed, because, like I said, there are some jobs that it's really good at. If you're going to buy the Dirt Juice Boss In A Can, keep it for those specific jobs, and tackle more regular cleaning using a standard degreaser, of which this formula is an excellent example.

In terms of value, £9.99 is about what you expect. Some, such as Finish Line's Speed Degreaser (tested by Stu last year), are more (£13.49 for 500ml), others – WD40's bike degreaser, for example, which Neil thought did an excellent job – are less (£6 for a 500ml can).

As I said earlier, it's not a good value way to buy degreaser, but it is a handy thing to reach for from time to time.

Verdict

Good degreaser that's handy for certain jobs, but expensive and wasteful as a first choice