I bought this steamer when I was still living in an apartment. I got tired of begging the leasing office to come in and clean the carpets, and I wasn't going to be paying a cleaning company every time the carpet got soiled. I had a few extra bucks at the time so I picked this one up.

The unit is attractive enough. The see-through blue plastic at the bottom piece is cool to look at, as it's easy to see the soapy water being extracted up through it. It doesn't really weigh much either, which is a plus. I like that fact that this unit doesn't have a whole bunch of different hoses to deal with as well.

I thought that doing the carpets on my own anytime I wanted was a good idea, but it didn't turn out that way. First of all, I have to buy the cleaning solution for it separately, and the stuff runs out fast. Then, I have to manually fill up the tank with hot water, and hurry and get it reattached before the water goes from hot to warm.

My idea was that it would be easy and fast to do the whole apartment. The way this thing works, that idea is simply not feasible. The motor on it is fairly powerful, but nowhere near that of a commercial carpet cleaning machine. I quickly grew tired and uninterested in moving this thing back and forth over the carpet, then dumping the dirty water tank and filling it with more hot water. The areas that I did manage to do did get pretty clean, so that was good. Also, the cleaning brushes did move at a pretty fast rate when going over the carpet, which I liked.

I believe this steamer was meant for smaller rooms, and spot cleaning. I bought it with the intention of doing the whole apartment, and that turned out to be too tedious. I wish the path the cleaning head passed over was wider as well, but that would mean getting a bigger and even more cumbersome unit. I really just use this for small spills nowadays, and I leave the whole house carpet cleaning to the professionals.