So much better than mopping!
Written: Jul 08 '02 (Updated Jul 08 '02)
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Pros: quick, easy, effective
Cons: you need to wipe up the grunge left behind
The Bottom Line: Definitely superior to a mop!
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| owling's Full Review: Eureka 4885B Stick Steam Cleaner |
I recently bought the Eureka Enviro Floor Steamer 300A and the Eureka Hot Shot Steamer 350A in an effort to make house-cleaning easier on our cats. I didn't want to risk that they'd walk through a missed bit of chemical, lick it off their paws, and get sick. The Hot Shot is absolutely wonderful, but it would be a pain to use it to do floors, so we picked up the floor steamer as well. At first I worried that it was a bit expensive for something that would only clean a few rooms of the house (most of our rooms are carpeted), but I have become quite happy that we purchased it since we started using it!
Easy to Use
It's quite easy to use the floor steamer. You attach the telescoping handle to the base by screwing it in. You cover the base of the steamer with one of the waffle-weave cloths that are included. Fill the provided cup twice with water, and pour into the steamer using the provided funnel. Cap it, plug it in, turn it on, wait until it starts steaming. Then slowly move over your floor.
This won't work on every surface. Self-adhesive vinyl squares, wax-treated floors and un-sealed wood are no-nos. It worked just fine on our vinyl kitchen and bathroom floors. It is recommended that you test the steamer on a corner of your floor before doing the whole thing.
Features
Sanitizing: A steamer can sanitize your floor, killing germs and dust mites, if you take a little extra time and hold it over an area for 8 seconds.
Lack of Chemicals: The steamer uses pure, normal tap water (distilled if your water is particularly hard), no chemicals. It's thus much safer and easier on your pets, your children, and your sensitive skin.
Dry Floor: Because the steamer puts less water on your floor, the floor dries literally within a minute or two. By the time we're halfway done with the kitchen, the floor is already dry where we started! No more waiting to go back into a room for a half-hour or more.
Cleaner Floor: On the one hand, the waffle-weave cloth doesn't actually pick everything up off the floor. We found that we had to take a couple of paper towels and go around the edge of the room picking up the last of the cruft (although it is much easier to pick up when it's shoved to the edge). On the other hand, unlike a mop, which trails its now-dirty water onto the floor by the time you're done with a room, the steamer is still clean! No need to decide between replacing the water halfway through or living with a dirty sheen on your floor. Just keep cleaning.
Quick: We easily clean the kitchen with water to spare, so it's a very quick process. No more rinsing the mop, wringing it out, cleaning out the bucket afterward, and so on. Just let the steamer cool down afterward and dump out any excess water.
Steamers All the Way!
Our house has stayed much cleaner since we bought our steamers. We no longer have to worry about the cats and spend lots of time trying to make sure we've rinsed everything thoroughly. Once one of the steamers is going, it's really easy to not only clean the stove top or kitchen floor we'd planned on, but just keep on going and take care of the counters or the bathroom floor as well.
The process is faster, and it doesn't irritate the sensitive skin on my fingers. No need to keep small bathrooms well-ventilated to handle chemical fumes. We find it much easier to clean, we get a great deal more cleaned, and everything comes out looking much shinier and nicer than it did when we used chemicals and scrubbed everything - for far less effort.
Sure, you need to use paper towels to wipe up the grunge that the steamers leave behind, and the waffle-weave cloths have to be hand-rinsed and line-dried. But who cares? In every other way our steamers are superior to our previous methods of cleaning. We've finally gotten to cleaning projects that have waited since we moved in a year ago. The steamers are well worth every penny we paid for them, and our house looks so much nicer!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 50
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Epinions.com ID:
owling
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Member: Heather Grove
Location: Maryland, USA
Reviews written: 689
Trusted by: 264 members
About Me:
Too many boxes to unpack, too few shelves...
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