Must Have for any bachelor pad, also makes a great wedding gift

I am a bachelor who hates to clean house.  Don't get me wrong, I make an honest effort, but housekeeping just isn't my thing.  (Mom was right;  ALWAYS have your front room, and your bathroom looking clean, as these are the rooms that visitors are most likely to see.  As for the REST of the house?  Well..... )

I bought my house about 6 years ago.  The carpets have never been cleaned since I moved in, and by the looks of them, I doubt they had ever been cleaned since they were first installed.  The previous owners of my house can only be described as Billy-Bob and Bubba.  Those guys were absolute SLOBS!  To look at the carpets, you would swear that they had used the living room as a muffler or engine shop, or dog kennel!  There were stains EVERYWHERE you looked!  The stains ranged from oil and grease, to pet and food messes, to "I think it's best if I DON'T know what THAT particular stain is!"  We're talking a Brawny kind of mess, as in the carpets were absolutely TRASHED!!!  The carpets are a cocoa brown color, with the exception of the master bedroom, which is deep, dark red shag.  Think Austin Powers.  Yeah Baby!  (Yuck!)  Both colors show dirt something terrible.

So anyway, I've been putting off getting the carpets cleaned, because hiring a professional can be really expensive.  Some of those yahoos want $300 just to clean three rooms, and depending on who you hire, sometimes all they really do is totally soak your carpet, fill your house up with humidity, and knock your piano out of tune!  Sometimes it can take a day and a half for the carpet to dry after some crackpot has come in and steam-soaked them.

(Ever gone house or apartment hunting, and walked into a place, only to be knocked over by the mildew smell of a recent steam-soak job done by some neighbor kid that the realtor or manager hired for cheap?  The smell can be nauseating.)

I did some checking around on-line and read reviews for various consumer steamvacs.  This one had very good reviews.  Oh yes, I was skeptical at first.  I thought, "Someone is probably paying these guys good money to write positive things about their products."  But the reviewers DO know what they're talking about!

This steam vac comes with a hose and two upholstery tools.  One of the tools has power brushes, the other does not.  The power brushes work the same way that the brushes on the main machine do.  The technology is called "SPIN SCRUB", and I believe it's a Hoover exclusive.  On the main machine, there are three settings for the brushes; high, low, or off.

Anyway, I bought this machine at Best Buy, took it home and assembled it.  Assembly is very easy.  Took maybe 15 minutes at the most.  Now there's supposed to be a way to store the hose on the back of the machine when you're not using it.  I couldn't figure out how to get the hose to stay put, so I tossed the hose in a closet.  (I'll clean my stairs and upholstery another day.)

The machine comes with a small bottle of Hoover General Purpose detergent.  This is what I used at first.  The machine looks and feels like a comercial-grade carpet extractor, but it is actually fairly lightweight.  It has two tanks; one for the solution, and one for recovery.  These tanks are a little on the small side (about one gallon each), so it DOES require frequent trips to the sink, to empty the recovery and re-fill the solution.  Both tanks detach from the machine, so it's like carrying two gallons of milk to and front the sink, instead of hauling the entire machine back and forth.  So... while the tanks are small, they are just-about-right  in size, if you think about it.

This machine has a "POWER SURGE" button, which is really nice.  It will dispense double the amount of detergent for those really tough spots.  (In my house, that would pretty much be the entire carpet!)

I discovered that there is a trick to using this machine.  Like most first-time users, I went a little too quickly.  You must move the machine S-L-O-W-L-Y if you want it to do a good job.  What I did was use the power surge on a forward and back stroke, then the normal trigger forward and back, then sucked it up with 2 forward and back strokes.  Excessive and time-consuming maybe, but it did the trick.

When I first used this machine, I used the small bottle of detergent that came with the machine.  Yes, it made a HUGE difference in the way the carpet looked, BUT....  many of the stains were still present.

The next weekend, after reading additional reviews, I bought 2 1-gallon containers of HOOVER DEEP CLEANING DETERGENT.  )The bottles were about $15 each, got them at Lowes.)   This detergent was the ticket!!!   I went back over my carpets, using the deep cleaning detergent, and I would say about 98% of the stains that were in the carpets are GONE!!!  UNBELIEVABLE!!!  Who would have guessed this generously-priced, portable machine could do all that!  I was impressed!  And...  would you believe I was actually ENJOYING cleaning?  Wow, that's a first!  It was great, watching all that dirt get sucked out of the carpet, through the transparent nozzel on the machine.  When I'd empty the recovery tank, the water was BLACK!  It was DISGUSTING, but in a good way! 

Per some other reviewer's suggestion, after I completed the room, I waited about 30 minutes, then I filled the solution tank with half capful of Downy fabric softener, and the rest with water.  I went back over the carpets (much quicker, because I was now rinsing as apposed to scrubbing).  The fabric softener really brought those carpets to life!  They feel so great to walk on now.  AND....  there is no nauseating, mildew smell that you'd typically get when hiring a "professional"!  The house smells wonderful!!!

Maybe next weekend I'll try the hose attachment and do the inside of my car.

I've got some upcoming weddings this summer, and I was thinking that this would make the perfect wedding gift.  It's not cheap, but it's affordable and practical. 

So guys, if you want your carpets looking great, and don't want to spend a lot of money, I'm confident you'll be happy with this machine.  You "MIGHT" actually enjoy cleaning house after you see what this thing can do!