Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Our 10 year-old Bissell Proheat 2x was getting banged up and finally stopped spraying water, so I figured it was time to get something new. Our old machine had separate water and soap containers, it heated the water to somewhere less than 190 degrees and it just worked - fabulously. It was regularly used at our Hawaii vacation rental condo 2-3 times per year to remove beach sand, red dirt and other spots and stains left behind by our guests. The carpet always cleaned up like it was new and I could count of my old beloved machine to make a dreary task worth the effort. Enter this new machine..... Designed with running-shoe inspired purple and green colors, I immediately noticed that it was much smaller and lighter than the old machine. The old tank-in-tank water container had been replaced with separate clean and dirty water containers, but the soap dispenser was gone and it no longer heated the water. Bummer.... But! The new machine was easy to take apart for cleaning, providing access to nooks and crannies that previously collected dirt, hair and carpet fibers, clogging the suction nozzles and decreasing performance - whoo-hoo! Yesterday I set about cleaning the carpet in our 14' x 16' living room, expecting it to take about one hour as it always did in the past. As I used the machine, I noticed that it didn't seem to be picking up a lot of water, but I thought maybe I just wasn't used to the new design. After two hours, the bottoms of my bare feet told me otherwise. I pushed onward, and back, and forth, and back and forth....three hours, then four hours. What the hell? Ok, maybe it's because of the humidity. Nope, it just wasn't suctioning water out of the carpet, so I got down on my hands and knees (getting them wet in the process) and looked closely at the base of the machine. It took about one minute to realize that when the handle is reclined with a full tank of clean water, the front of the machine and the suction ports lift up and are barely gliding across the surface of the carpet. The base isn't heavy enough to provide constant contact with the carpet, and the shorter you are the more you will have the handle reclined until you're basically plodding around in wet, dirty carpet. AAAGGGHHHH!!! I quickly searched for a solution to the problem and found that if I put extra weight on the base of the machine, it immediately started sucking up water that had been left behind, and within 30 minutes the carpet was being dried and "groomed" as it always had been with our old machine. After a total of five hours, I was finished. If you are determined to buy this machine, just remember that in order to actually clean your carpet, you will need to place something heavy on the base, like a bottle of laundry soap, or maybe a five pound bag of rice (there's plenty of that in Hawaii...), or maybe even a small child - they can help guide you to the areas of the carpet that need the most attention.