Bissell: Well-designed, easy to use, and WORKS!

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Update November 2009!
Recently, my wonderful red machine (that I've used nearly daily for months now)  stopped spraying water.  After much messing around, I got it to work again, but it quickly quit again.  I was baffled.   After some serious exploration in the guts of the machine, figuring out the way it works, I found that it was mechanically sound.  After some online snooping, though, I found some folks who had run into the same issue.  Hard water.  I live in a place with mineral-rich water and have a lot of problems with scale and lime.  As it turns out, this was the issue.  If this happens to you, use CLR or Limeaway, diluted, as your cleaning solution.  I put the machine in my shower and ran  the solution through the machine, much like I do with my coffee maker.  After some time, it finally started to work again.  While I am unsure at this point how or if a product like CLR will have an adverse effect on the system, it beat having to send it off to be fixed or, God forbid, buy a new one.  It now works like a champ, I've stopped cursing the universe, and my carpet is clean again. 
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I've recently been in carpet-cleaning hell, and this prompted a scathing review on the Atlantis carpet cleaner.   Not willing to be burned a third time, I read reviews all over the place and went with the top-of-the-line Bissell upright, with 12 cleaning brushes, air drying, heat, and colored an attractive IU crimson (Go Hoosiers!).   I'm truly impressed with this machine, so far. 

The bottom line:  I have 3 geriatric mutts who have the occasional 'accident' and one extremely lively (and messy) Golden Retriever who doesn't wipe her feet when coming inside.  Thus, my light-colored berber is much less light-colored, and somewhat stained.  After some heavy-duty action with my new Bissell, my pale berber now looks like new.  Seriously.  No steam cleaner/extractor EVER got things completely out, and I have had pretty much every brand there is in this house. 

Caveat:  getting your carpet really clean involves some work and your carpet cleaner is not magical.  You have to use it correctly, not soak the carpet, and spend a little time repeatedly going over badly stained areas, no matter what machine you're using.  Predicated on this fact, I found that the Bissell made this job much easier on many levels.

Now--why I think this is a superior machine.  Pros first.

Problem:  Too much water in your carpet is never good...leads to mold and stains magically reappear if you don't get all the water out of it.  This has been my primary problem with the staining.  

Solution:  The Bissell has a few features that make getting your carpet dry much easier. 

1.  The trigger system makes it easy to spray the soapy solution without over-soaking the carpet.  There is a flow meter on the base of the machine that spins...kind of like a wheel of fortune without the money.  If it spins while you're triggering, the flow is working.  If it doesn't, you're out of solution or out of clean water.  It's attention-grabbing.  If you're obsessively pressing the trigger and soaking your carpet unnecessarily, this will draw your attention to this fact.  You don't need a whole lot of water in the carpet to clean it well. 
2.  Additionally, the spot shooter is a handy thumb press away...and you can actually see where you're putting the water, as this is a water-gun type affair that protrudes from the front right of the machine.  If you position the cleaner just in back of the spot, it shoots a rather powerful stream of water/solution onto a small area.  Con:  it's a really small area that's covered, and you really have to wiggle it around a little to cover a larger area.  Most steam cleaners have a feature that allows you to get more cleaner on an area, but not visibly and not with such precision.
3.  Last but not least, this cleaner blows heated air on the carpet as you extract the cleaning solution.  Proof that this works came about in an unexpected yet amusing way.  4 dogs=vast amounts of shed hair.  I have a Dyson that does an excellent job of vacuuming up the pet hair, however, there's always some left.   I used the carpet cleaner for the first time and assummed that there would be some hair being pulled up.  I did not expect that the residual hair would be blown out from under the machine, in a perfectly dry little ball and ready to be picked up by hand, rather than me having to to flip the machine and dig out the mat of wet hair from the brush system.  Wow!  An unexpected advantage.  And it really does help dry the carpet.

Problem: Too much soap, not enough soap?  Too much and you're skating on soap suds, and solution left in the carpet leads to spottiness.  Too little and you're not killing germs and loosening dirt as well as you could.  Heat or no heat?   Hot water does do a better job of helping you clean.  Laundry, washing dishes, whatever.  Need hot water, and hot tap water cools off fast in any extracter.

Solution:  This machine has 4 settings that allow you to determine how much soap gets mixed into the clean water.  Heavy, normal and light, and one setting that allows you to just water rinse.  Just from listening to the difference as I switched modes, I also believe you get more brush action with heavy-duty mode.  I also noticed that in heavy-duty mode, your solution container goes empty MUCH faster.  I dilute my solution in the solution tank a little so that heavy-duty cleaning does not end up using a ton of solution.

Hot water--not a problem.  The machine has a switch that activates the heating system (you don't have to have heated water if you don't want to, but why wouldn't you want to?!) that keeps your hot tap water hotter longer.   And it really does make a difference.

Problem:  "What?  It's empty already?"

Solution (sort of):  The machine has a 1-gallon capacity which is respectable and pretty standard.  The water will last a long time if you do not soak the carpet as stated above.  This is not so much a bonus of the machine, as it is practice in using it (see flow control mentioned above)

Now, the problem  here, and it's not so much a problem as an inconvenience, is that the cleaner has a clever bladder system.  In other words, the clean water lives in the same container as the dirty water, so you only have one container to deal with.  The clean water occupies a bladder inside of the collection tank.  The dirty water surrounds the bladder.  Filling it is simple..and easy.  Emptying it is also easy, but if you're emptying it while there's still clean solution in the bladder, you're also wasting clean water (which will have some solution mixed in with it.)  Why would this happen you ask?  Well, I sometimes refill the bladder while it's still in the machine (some water always remains in the carpet, so the collection tank can go a little longer without emptying it).  I guess if I didn't do that, I wouldn't be wasting water/solution mixture.  So, my fault there. I still wish I had a means to close the neck of the bladder while emptying to avoid this though.

Problem:  Need specialized tools to meet all cleaning needs...furniture, hard-to-reach places, stairs....

Solution:  Lots of tools come with this machine.  Many are on-board and some need to be stored.  I have used the small sprayer/extractor, the sprayer/extracter with rotary brush action, and the crevice tool.  The wide stair tool has not been employed yet.

The smaller hand tool was problematic on my furniture because it has a much wider spray pattern than the tool itself, and so you're not able to get the solution out of the furniture/carpet in one pass, and on a vertical surface, such as a chair back, you end up with drips.  So I switched to the other tool, the one with the brush.  A cool little gadget that allows you to turn off the brushes if you want to.  This seemed to work a lot better on my furniture.  And it did a fantastic job on the furniture. 

There's a long hose that fits neatly onboard, and with the small hand extractor, clips onto the back.  Con:  I was constantly knocking it loose.   Just an annoyance. 

Other considerations:  It's a heavy machine, in the 25-30 lb. range wthout water, which would weigh in at 8 lbs per gallon.  But it is NOT difficult to maneuver.  It has generous wheels that help it glide very easily.  It is not much more difficult than your average upright vacuum.

Some cons overall:  I think storage might be a problem, though since it is fairly large and no way to fold down the handle and compact it.

Power cord:  It's located on the side of the machine and is sometimes awkward to manage.  Well, actually, for me, always hard to manage and keep from stepping on.  I can't tell you how many cords I've yanked loose by stepping on them.  I find that you have to keep a hand on it at all times, and try to keep it in place on the top hook of the cord caddy to keep from stepping on it.  Also, if you don't watch out, the cord can get tangled in the space between the machine and the large wheels.

Overall, the annoyances are not really so bad as to make me wish I hadn't purchased this machine at a hefty price of $289.  I am glad I did.  Due to the nature of the construction and sturdiness of the materials, and proper care, I expect this machine to last for years.  If it doesn't, you'll definitely hear about it here. From me.  Strongly.

Again, it does matter how you use it.  If you soak the carpet, use too much soap, and don't adequately go over your problem areas, and go over them slowly enough to allow the cleaner to extract the water, you won't have good results no matter what machine you use.  The Bissell does a great job of making that job easier and more effective.