How to Clean Outdoor Sunbrella Fabric Cushions - Yes, You Can Scotchguard Them

For about the last year our patio furniture has been left outside under a large pine tree. The Sunbrella cushions were new last year, but when we looked at them today, they were covered in dirt, sap, bird poop, and food stains from the summer. All of this dirt and grime has been baked in to the cushions from the sun, and soaked in through the heavy rains of the winter. To say the least, we have some very dirty cushions.

Today we decided to clean the cushions to see if we can salvage them and put them in our garage until summer. Sunbrella has pretty good instructions for cleaning the fabric. We followed the heavy cleaning instructions. Use one gallon of water, mix it with one cup of bleach and 1/4 cup of dish soap. When we mixed it together, it made a very sudsy mixture.

We then brushed the cushions clean and began scrubbing them. It was making an improvement, but my wife decided to try another technique to clean the cushions. She sprayed the fabric with Woolite Oxy cleaning spray. After spraying, she let the cushions sit for a few minutes and then we scrubbed them with a bristly brush.

We then compared the cushions we cleaned with the Oxy spray vs the bleach mixture. The Oxy spray was doing a better job, so we used it for the rest of the cushions. Once we were done scrubbing, we rinsed the cushions off with a hose and placed them in the garage to dry.

Most of dirt came out easy. The stains caused from the sap were mostly gone, but not completely. It looks like the cushions are clean enough and look decent good enough to make it through another summer. My only concern is that the Sunbrella cushion coverings couldn't be removed from the cushions while we cleaned them, so the cleaning mixture soaked into the cushion. We rinsed the cushions thoroughly, but only time will tell if we removed enough of the cleaning spray residue to make our aggressive cleaning successful.