We Tried The Pool Noodle Funnel Trick And It Zapped The Mess Out Of Our Home Projects

We've all been there. You need to fill up a large bucket of water for mopping the floor, watering plants, or creating a solution for cleaning your walls, but you can't fit the bucket in your sink. Some resort to filling up their buckets in the shower, bathtub, or even outside with the garden hose. Yet, one crafty TikTok account has possibly found an even easier solution.

Using only a pool noodle, @hometalk on TikTok funnels water from their kitchen sink into a bucket with ease. They attach the pool noodle to their faucet, turn on the spout, and it pushes the water through the tube without spilling a drop. If you've ever tried to fill a bucket in your sink when it clearly doesn't fit, you know how easy it is to accidentally send a wave of water across your counter as you try to squeeze and shift it from under the faucet. This easy and inexpensive hack seems to totally avoid this. However, we needed to try it out to know for sure.

Gathering our materials for this experiment was simple. We already had a blue Big Joe Foam Swimming Pool Noodle on hand that we purchased from Walmart for $0.98, so the only item we had to go out and buy was a large bucket to fill with water. At Target, we chose an 11-quart bucket from Made by Design that cost only $5.

We set up the test in our apartment's small kitchen, where we have a shallow stainless steel kitchen sink with an arching double-handle faucet. The spout ended up being perfect for this experiment as the pool noodle fit snugly around it. We simply lined the noodle's hole up with the nozzle and pushed it upward toward the curve to keep the water from spraying out in the opposite direction. Then, the other end of the pool noodle was placed into the bucket on the floor in front of the sink, where we planned to fill it with water.

Once our setup was complete, it was finally time to test out the pool noodle hack. We started by turning the sink on slowly, and water dribbled down the tube and into our bucket. With things looking good, we turned on the cold water all the way and found that it filled up the 11-quart container efficiently. When the bucket was nearly full, we turned off the faucet and waited a moment before removing the pool noodle to make sure all of the water had drained out.

We didn't encounter many problems during the experiment besides a bit of water still left in the noodle. However, it did dry over time. Another thing we noticed that could be frustrating is that the sink must be mostly empty for the hack to work. Of course, the solution is as simple as quickly doing your dishes before attaching your pool noodle to the faucet, but it should be known that the foam will take up some room in the sink. It might not fit onto your spout if there are large pots and pans in the way, especially if your pool noodle is extra thick. Still, there are many more advantages than disadvantages. The hack makes filling the bucket simple and requires little setup. Cleaning up is also easy as you can store the noodle in a walk-in pantry or nearby closet with your other cleaning supplies for easy access when you need it.

As we said previously, there are a few different uses for this hack. In the viral TikTok, they fill their bucket with water and use it to mop their floor with a traditional cotton string mop. Yet, in our apartment, we alternate between using a Swiffer WetJet Mop and a Shark steam mop to clean our laminate flooring. Still, our freshly filled bucket of water was going to be of good use.

On our second-story patio, we have begun a small garden featuring a strawberry plant, tomatoes, dill, and cilantro, along with a few ornamentals, including marigolds and aubrieta flowers. As the weather has become hotter, all of our container plantings need more frequent watering, which is a challenge as our hose won't reach the deck. Thankfully, with the help of this hack, we were able to carry our large bucket of water the short distance between our kitchen and patio to easily water our plants without needing to go back and forth with our small watering can. The pool noodle funnel trick worked as well as we had hoped, and we would certainly recommend it to our friends struggling with filling large buckets of water in their sink.