In my local Lidl this weekend, I noticed a stash of ultrasonic cleaners retailing at £19.99 each. Usually they’d be used for things like jewellery. But I’d seen a couple of videos online with people using them to clean bike components – particularly cassettes and chains.

So I bought one, removed the cassette from my bike, and made the video above.

The first thing to say is that I’m not great at keeping everything sparkling. My cassette was filthy. So even running 2 x 8 minute runs had limited effect at first. The water and degreaser solution I cleaned it in turned a very murky colour, but the cassette needed some further help with an old toothbrush and some elbow grease.

The other issue is that this is a very small ultrasonic cleaner. It would even take the larger cogs of my cassette in one go. I had to clean that part in two goes, with half the cog submerged each time.

That all said, I think it was perhaps a little easier to clean that if I’d not used it at all. And £20 is very reasonable.

This is by not means a magic bullet to automatically clean everything, but another useful tool in your arsenal.