Disclaimer – We received this item free for the purpose of this review/feature but all words and opinions are our own.
Not many of us have dentures anymore but plenty of people, including myself have retainers after orthodontic work or mouth guards to prevent teeth grinding at night. Don’t forget the sports mouth guards too and each of them cost a bomb as they have to be specially made. All of these dental appliances need cleaning and despite best efforts, an electric toothbrush doesn’t always get them clean.
I wear a mouth guard at night to protect my teeth from grinding. The appliance, shown in these photos, is made of a type of tough plastic and has to be custom made. It costs over £140 so you want to make them last as long as possible. The Sonic Spa Pro is designed for dentures and dental appliances to be able to get them clean where brushing alone can’t. I was sent a Sonic Spa Pro to test and as my mouth guard hasn’t been sonically cleaned before, I was so keen to get the stubborn limescale marks off of it without using harmful products.
The Sonic Spa Pro is not a very big appliance and certainly not complicated to use. The white ‘dome’ actually looks a bit like a big tooth! The box comes with the power cord and some cleaning tablets which dissolve in the water. There’s nothing else needed. Inside the sonic machine, there is a tank which you fill with water, drop in the cleaning tablet and then the dental appliance and then close the lid. The handy instructions on the top give you a quick reference of how to use it as you’re unlikely to keep instruction manuals for something you don’t usually use very often. The button on the top is held down for 2 seconds to give a 3 minute sonic clean, or hold it down a second time for a 5 minute clean. It’s that simple!
You can walk away from the Sonic Spa Pro and leave it working. There’s a tiny ringing sounds that emits from it, presumably the sonic waves doing their magic, then once it’s finished you can open and see what kind of clean you’ve attained! The Sonic Spa Pro also cleans jewellery and some stationery items like brass nail nibs (great if you’re an artist or calligrapher) and small metal items. The Sonic Spa Pro uses UV as well as sonic to clean so there are actually lots of items which could be cleaned. The included tablets are for dental appliances only though, and they are designed to leave a minty taste to your appliances whilst also killing 99.9% of odours and bacteria.
Once the appliance has been cleaned, fish it out of the water and either dry it or let it dry. In my case, once I had dried the mouth guard I could see it needed another clean so this time I did a deep clean. We live in an extremely hard water area so the calcium build up is enormous and because the appliance is custom made, the nooks and crannies of teeth make it impossible to get clean with just an electric toothbrush.
When I removed it for the second time and dried off the mouth guard, I could see that a lot of the calcium deposits were less caked on. There were still traces there, like little grains of sand in some of the deeper pockets but it was a lot less. This was the first time I had properly sonic cleaned it though so I thought it might take a few tries. You can see in the before and after photos that there is an improvement though!
Next time I clean using the Sonic Spa Pro I’ll make sure to use warmer water and let the appliance soak a bit longer after the deep clean to allow for the cleaning tablet to work deeper. I haven’t had a chance to try the Sonic Spa Pro on any other jewellery or household items, but now that I’ve seen an improvement, I’m seriously looking at what I have around the house that needs some sonic treatment…
Currently available for £69.95 at: https://uk.sonicdental.co/products/the-sonic-spa?shpxid=80ecc2ff-7d1e-4e8d-a4e5-4e69c2a06f3c
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