Which 0000 Steel Wool Is Best for Cleaning Windows?

I've been cleaning windows for 25 years and using 0000 steel wool on glass for about eight of them. In all that time I've never seen anyone properly test one brand against another. You buy whatever's on the shelf, you get a feel for it, and that's about as scientific as it gets.

So I bought six brands from around the world and tested them properly.

The short answer: Elephant Brand won, and it wasn't close. It scored 21 out of 25 while nothing else got past 15, and you can buy it here in Australia. If you want the best value instead, All Star scored 15 points at $5.20 per 100g, less than a fifth of what the dearest one costs, though you'll be paying freight from the States to get it (unless you live there).

And that dearest one, AIMALL, finished last.

Brand	Country	Format	Total weight	Price paid	Price per 100g
Elephant Brand (International Steel Wool)	China	16 pre-made pads, 16g each	256g	$35.00	$13.70
ABC Steel Wool	Malaysia	12 pre-made pads, 20g each	250g	$19.80 inc GST	$7.90
All Star / NICE (High Tech Industries)	USA	16 pre-made pads, 12g each	192g	$10.00	$5.20
RAKSO Stahlwolle	Germany	Continuous roll	200g	$34.62	$17.30
Celtic Woods Liberon	Luxembourg	Continuous roll	34g	$10.14	$29.80
AIMALL (unbranded, dragon logo box)	China	Continuous roll	61g	$18.24	$29.90

Prices are what I paid, before shipping. Some came from the local shop, some online. ABC was bought here in Australia so its price includes GST, where most of the others didn't. If anything that makes it slightly better value than the table shows, not worse.

One to keep in mind about All Star. I ordered NICE, which is WCR's house brand in the States, and All Star is what turned up in the box, so I'm taking them to be the same product. Either way it came from America, and that $5.20 doesn't include getting it here. Do the sums on freight for your own order before you call it cheap.

Elephant Brand I bought here in Australia, from Freshway Supplies. That matters given how it finished.

How I tested the steel wool

https://youtu.be/oOWSudUvg30?si=Cm5KfBjxgRUleE5d

Six brands of 0000 steel wool tested by a window cleaner. Scored on mark removal, clogging, comfort and rust.

I set up a large glass panel with a white curtain behind it, so everything could be photographed/filmed evenly and you could actually see what was left on the glass. Then I marked out six identical squares, one per brand, and put the same six contaminants in every square:

All six brands on the same pane, cleaned strip by strip between tape lines so you can see the difference side by side.

• Egg white with green food dye, standing in for bee and bug splatter

• Packaging tape adhesive, heat-set with a heat gun and left for 24 hours before peeling

• Roast fat and juices, dried on (the lamb roast was delicious, by the way)

• Bleach water spray to replicate hard water stains

• Black spray paint overspray

• A red permanent marker line

All left to dwell for 24 hours. Then two more tests.

The clog test

Twenty circles of white bar soap rubbed onto shower glass for each brand, then each pad wet and used to scrub its own patch off. Afterwards I laid all six down side by side with the rubbed face up.

You don't need instruments for this one. The pads that performed the worst with soap came out obviously whiter. With the better performers, the scrubbing face stayed more open - you could still see the steel wool through the face. That difference matters, because a pad that holds onto everything it lifts stops working halfway through a job.

This is also where the wool made to a single strand thickness gave itself away. Those ones packed up noticeably faster. I didn't work out why on my own, one of the manufacturers explained it to me, explained further in this article.

The rust test

All six pads wet at the same moment and laid on labelled white paper. Photographed at 30 minutes, 2 hours and 24 hours. I was looking for the first meaningful sign of orange rust, the point where you'd rather toss it than use it on glass again.

The scoring

Five categories, five points each, 25 total. No weighting, every category counts the same.

Category	What I judged
Hard mark removal	Dry first, then wet
Stays unclogged	How much soap the face held after scrubbing
Form and format	Pre-made pad or roll, how it comes out of the packet
Harshness on fingers	Comfort in the hand, wiry or soft
Rust resistance	How long before rust made it unusable

Price wasn't scored. I tracked it separately, because what you pay is your business, not a measure of how the wool performs.

Hard mark removal, timed

Brand	Time
Elephant Brand	1 min 26 sec
Celtic Woods Liberon	1 min 30 sec
AIMALL	1 min 52 sec
All Star / NICE	2 min 08 sec
RAKSO Stahlwolle	2 min 25 sec
ABC Steel Wool	2 min 30 sec

Look at ABC there. It's slowest of all of them on raw speed, yet it still finished equal second overall. Speed is one category out of five. A pad that shifts a mark quickly but clogs solid, rusts overnight and chews your fingertips is not the pad you want in your hand all day.

The final scores

Place	Brand	Score /25	Price per 100g
1	Elephant Brand	21	$13.70
2=	ABC Steel Wool	15	$7.90
2=	All Star / NICE	15	$5.20
4=	RAKSO Stahlwolle	14	$17.30
4=	Celtic Woods Liberon	14	$29.80
6	AIMALL (unbranded)	10	$29.90

What the results actually tell you

Price tells you nothing. AIMALL is the dearest per gram of the six and it came last. All Star is the cheapest by a wide margin, less than a fifth of AIMALL's price per gram, and it tied for second. If you've been buying on price, either direction, you've been guessing.

Country tells you nothing either. The winner and the loser were both made in China. Germany came fourth. Luxembourg came fourth. Malaysia came second. Whatever you think you know about where good steel wool comes from, the glass doesn't care.

Pads beat rolls, for me at least. All three pad brands finished above all three roll brands, which looks like a clean result until you know how the scoring worked. One of the five categories was form and format, and I scored that on my own preference.

I like a pad. I like opening the packet and having something that's ready to go without having to rip or cut it. That gives me shivers down the spine for some reason.

Plenty of good window cleaners feel the other way. They'd rather tear off exactly what they need and not pay for a shape they can make themselves, and there's nothing wrong with that reasoning. If that's you, take that part of the score with a grain of salt, because that's my taste rather than how the wool performs. The other four categories stand on their own.

I asked all six where their wool comes from

'Steel wool pads' lost in translation moment - 'Tampons'?

While I was buying, I emailed every one of them and asked the same two questions. Where is this made, and what makes yours better than the rest? Five wrote back. Elephant Brand, the best performing steel wool, never answered at all.

The German outfit was the most surprising. Four different brand names I'd seen online all come out of the same plant in Lahr, Germany. Same wool, different packets, aimed at different markets and different countries.

With Liberon, I got two different answers. A reseller told me France, the brand's own people told me Luxembourg. Whoever sells you the packet often doesn't know what's inside it, which is worth remembering when you're buying online.

The best answer came from the Malaysian brand (ABC), and it's the single most useful thing to come out of the whole exercise. Most steel wool is drawn to one strand thickness for the entire pad. It's cheaper to make, but the fibres lie flat against each other, so the pad packs down fast and the muck you've just lifted gets trapped at the surface of the pad. ABC does a blend of slightly different strand thicknesses, which keeps the pad open, lets the grit lift clear of the glass, and keeps it cutting for longer.

That is exactly what the soap test showed. It also explains something I'd noticed for years without knowing why. Some pads get clogged really fast, while others keep going.

They also sent me some tips on how to comparison test different window cleaning steel wools, which I used.

The three verdicts

Best performer: Elephant Brand. 21 out of 25, ahead on marks, ahead on clogging, and the only one that felt genuinely good in the hand. I got mine from Freshway Supplies. No arrangement with them, they're just where I bought it.

Best value: All Star / NICE. 15 out of 25 at $5.20 per 100g, which nothing else gets near on paper. The catch is that it came from the States, so add freight before you compare.

The one I'd skip: AIMALL. 10 out of 25, dearest per gram of the six, and it comes in an unbranded box with a dragon on it and no manufacturer you can ask questions of. It actually felt rougher in the hand, as though it was only 000 grade, not 0000.

Whichever brand you land on

A few things hold true across all six.

Genuine 0000 grade only. Anything coarser has no business on a window.

Never use rusty or dirty wool. Wet wool rusts fast. Even the best of the six didn't make it through to the next day once it had been wet. Treat steel wool as a consumable.

Decide dry or wet before you start. Dry is for light detailing and touch-ups, and you don't normally need to squeegee after it. Wet is for hard water marks and anywhere you're covering a decent area. Wet works much quicker and with much less effort, but the order matters. Wet wool first, then squeegee off, same as after mopping.

Two things catch people out. Once a pad's wet, it's on death row. Youll be binning it by the end of the day. It will never dry out and be able to be used dry before it gets rusty.

So make the call at the start of the job. On a maintenance clean where most of the glass is fine, mop and squeegee as normal and keep a dry pad for the odd touch-up. On a job where every window is going to need extra work, go wet from the start.

Check what you're working on

Tinted and Low-E glass need extra care, and that's a longer conversation than this post. Read my blog on why window cleaners use 0000 steel wool.

The tool I used for all of it

Every one of those six brands was tested in the same holder, a solid foam block called the Yellow Brick that I designed because there was no proper way to use 0000 wool on a pole.

It holds a pad flat under an elastic, so it's comfortable to scrub with by hand instead of cramping your fingers around a floppy pad of wool. And it jams straight onto any window cleaning pole tip without adaptors, so you can work high glass and skylights from the ground and leave the ladder on the van. Nothing hard or sharp goes anywhere near the glass. Being foam, the block itself can't mark it.

See my blog post about the making of the Yellow Brick steel wool holder, which has just been released in August 2026.

XPRT Yellow Brick | 0000 Steel Wool Holder for Window Cleaning Poles

A$18.50

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