This is the first carpet shampooer I have owned, and was very unsure about what brand to buy and how much to spend. The Bissel ProHeat 2X 9200 was a good choice for ease of use and price. After some trial and error, I discovered just how well it could clean.
The unit comes out of the box in several pieces, some of which just slide into place and some that need to be screwed in. Assembly was relatively simple, but the instructions could have been more clear (the illustrations were odd -- but it would have been hard to assemble it incorrectly). The box also contained a bottle of stain pretreater, and a bottle of "fiber cleaner" which is their regular strength carpet shampoo. It's simple enough to figure out how to fill up the cleaner compartment, as well as the water bladder. As other reviewers have mentioned, the clean, hot water goes into a bladder, while the dirty water gets sucked up and is contained within the plastic compartment the bladder is in. The water tank is actually two parts, which come apart when you need to dump out the dirty water, and add more clean water. The water tank fits easily in the unit, and has a handle for ease of portability.
After you have filled up the water and shampoo tanks, you need to turn on the button to heat the water AND the power button that makes the vacuum run. The instructions say to let it run for about a minute before you use it. I think that if you put hot enough water in from the start that you can run it right away.
Being a newbie to carpet cleaning I didn't understand the instructions when they said to move the unit slowly across the carpet. I was using it in a vacuum cleaner-like motion, but that was too fast. You really need to slow down and basically work in just straight lines. You dispense cleaner in the forward stroke and the backward stroke, then release the trigger to stop dispensing, and just slowly go back and forth until no more water can be seen getting sucked up. My learning curve was pretty long (I lack the domestic gene) and discovered the next day that I had left a lot of carpet shampoo in the carpet. The carpet was stiff and crunchy. The unit has a "water rinse" setting, which I successfully used to remove the excess shampoo residue. That led me to change the cleaning setting from normal to light so that less shampoo would be dispensed. After that I had no problems at all. Just a note, which may not affect others... my carpets had never been seriously cleaned before this. They are about 3 years old and I am the only one living in the house, so there is not a lot of wear happening here. The Bissel really dug in and got a lot of carpet fibers pulled out, which it then smeared all over the top of the carpet, leaving a big trail of fuzz balls. I felt like I was cleaning up after a dog - walking behind it with a plastic bag to clean up its messes. But once the first pass or two was complete, that was all there was of the fuzz.
My living room is about 12 x 20 feet, and it took quite a while to get the carpet cleaned. I worked in sections about 6 x 6 feet, which is a good size for pushing and pulling the unit in slow straight lines. It would take 6 to 8 passes to suck up all the moisture, leaving the carpet slightly damp to the touch. And it seemed that I was emptying the dirty water compartment faster than I could use up the clean water, which is odd, because I would have thought that they would both hold the same volume. The vacuum automatically shuts down when the dirty water compartment becomes full. However, it can also shut down if you tilt the unit in the wrong direction. If you hear a loud "pop" that means the vacuum has shut down. If the dirty water compartment is not full (a float indicates when its full) you just turn off the unit for a minute and it will reset itself.
While the machine is off it will leak. My advice is to roll it onto a towel while you are stopping to change the water or when you are done for the day. Cleanup is fairly simple. If you have a big enough sink, just put the water tank in the sink and rinse it a couple of times. It will start to stink if you don't clean it right away. And, because of all the fuzz mentioned previously, I had a lot of it stuck in the beater brushes and beyond. The brush area has a lot of room so I was able to pull it out with my fingers. The hardest part to clean is the narrow opening where the water gets sucked out of the carpet. I would need something like a 12 inch pipe cleaner to get the fuzz out of there. It would be nice if they included some sort of cleaning tool to get debris out with.
Overall, I am very satisfied with this carpet cleaner and would recommend it to folks with light to medium dirt levels. It got out the lighter dirt all over the carpet, and also got out a stain that had been there for two years. The design is good, although I got a blister from the handle. The unit is sturdy and seems well made.
As an added bonus, this device also gets out the dents that your furniture puts in the carpet, and fluffs out the heavy traffic ears so they look less worn out.
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