Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought this thing on the basis of all the good reviews it got. I had a larger Bissell machine for many years and I was largely satisfied with it. But I wanted something a little more compact and lighter. Pros: This thing really is more like a slightly heavier, regular vacuum cleaner in use, which means it is an awful lot easier to push around. It seems to clean about as well as my big beast of a Bissell did, maybe even a bit better, judging by how much filthy water it ultimately pulled up from my carpet. The routine cleaning of the machine, rinsing out the parts etc. after you are done using it seems fairly easy, a bit easier than my old Bissell because you can take the suction head off easily and run it under the sink and it was reasonably easy to pull the inevitable bits of dog hair and carpet fuzz off the rollers. It was noisy, but not much noisier than my old machine. Cons: Water is heavy, and a big reason why this thing is lighter and easier to use is that the water tanks are much smaller. The water dispenser bottle is like two Nalgene bottles put together, which means you get less than 10 minutes of run time with the water spraying. So you have to stop, refill the clean water and empty the dirty water tank much more frequently than you will with a larger machine. If you are cleaning a very big room nowhere near a sink or tub, that will get old soon. The brush head is narrower as well, meaning more passes are required to clean the same area. So buying something like for most people is going to be a kind of a pick-your-poison thing. Either you can get a big heavy machine that is more work to push around or something lighter that requires more trips to the sink and so will take you a fair bit more time to handle a large area. If you have a huge house full of wall-to-wall carpet with kids and dogs etc. this is probably not the machine for you. If you have a few area rugs that you want to give a deep clean once or twice a year, this will be ideal. If you are somewhere between these two extremes, you just need to decide what is more important to you. It seems fairly well built for the price, which is not the same thing as actually heavy-duty. It strikes me as something that should last a while if it gets only occasional use and you are reasonably gentle with it. But if you are pulling this out every week, that may be asking a lot of something this inexpensive. So far, I have only discovered two obvious design flaws: (1) There is actually a small lip around the drain plug you use to drain the water from the dirty water tank, which makes it needlessly difficult to get the very last fraction of an ounce of water out of the dirty water tank. This is really only annoying when you clean the machine to put it away, it means that part will take forever to dry. (2) The power cord is attached to the bottom of the machine, not up by the handle. It should have some kind of clip to keep it up out of the way, and I found that if I wasn't careful I'd keep running over the cord. It would cost literally no money to put a clip for the cord up by the handle, but I guess I will be putting a zip tie on it instead. BTW, having had one of these home carpet cleaning machines for years, the most important tip I can give anybody just starting with one of these things is this: NEVER just run the soap/water solution through the machine and stop. Not only is the job only half done, but worse, the soap residue will dry inside the hoses and mechanism and eventually clog everything up and ruin the machine. Instead, you want to rinse out the clean/water soap mix thing and then run plain water through the machine at least 2x as much as the soap loads. So if you put down 3 loads of soap, plan on running 6 loads of clear water minimum through the machine to get all of that soap you laid down back out of the carpet. As you will soon see, the plain hot water will continue to pull out tons of additional dirt from the carpet along with the soap, and you want the carpet soap out of the carpet before you stop anyway. How do you know when you are done? You should keep going, using just plain water at least until you aren't seeing lots of soaping foam coming back out of the carpet, and ideally until the water you are pulling from the carpet is no longer utterly filthy. If the dirty water still has some dirt in it, but it is no longer black as coal and you can start to see through it, that is when you should be about done. And then run the machine over the whole carpet again without any clear water in it to suck up any residual water in the carpet. That will help the carpet dry more quickly. Here was my experience in cleaning an admittedly filthy 8x10 foot rug. First I needed just under two full loads of the soap/water mix to cover the entire carpet. Then I needed to run another 4 loads of plain water to largely remove the soap from the carpet. Then I ran the machine empty over the entire rug several times to get the residual water out of the carpet. All in, it took quite a while and was a fair bit of work, but the end result was excellent, the carpet looks a whole lot better than it did. Overall, I recommend this thing, it is not for everybody, but it should fit the bill for a lot of people.