Hi have had my steam cleaner a week now and used it on a variety of surfaces.
This steamcleaner is very compact the size of a very small cylinder vacuum cleaner and very light, I could lift it one handed no problem. We bought ours from Argos for £59.95. It came well packed but was hard to locate all of 15 accessory pieces as some were stuck to others. In the end I managed to locate everything.
It has a 1.6L water tank that you fill with a jug and a small funnel. The water tank has a "child proof" cap that prevents you unscrewing when the tank is hot preventing burns but does make it a little tricky to open.
Once you have filled the tank with water you plug the machine in and wait. Mine took about 10 minutes to get up to temperature, although you can shorten this by putting hot water in the tank to start with. Then you have about 50 minutes worth of steam. I managed to clean our sofa, a rug, some stains off the carpet and the kitchenfloor without running out.
Use is fairly simple. You attach whatever accessory piece you need and just pull the trigger to get steam. The trigger has a childproof lock to prevent your child from using it when your back is turned. I wouldn't recommend using this cleaner with a child around just for safety reasons as it does jet steam out quite a distance.
So far I have used this to clean our leather sofa, I didn't even remember what colour it was. You use the small 2in1 adaptor with a cotton cloth. The sofa did get quite wet though and I had to use a towel to mop off all the dirty water as the cloth couldn't get all of it. However, the sofa now looks as good as new.
I then changed to the floor accessory and cleaned the kitchen floor tiles. Cleaning was easy but as it's water it can get a bit slippery. This time you use a large cloth attached to the wand to get the dirty water, you could use an old tea towel instead.
After doing this I then decided to try and get a stain on the carpet out using the floor accessory without the cloth, this came out quite easily.
Having tried all this I decided to call it a day, after turning off the unit you have to wait for everything to cool down again before you can put it away (about 45 minutes). Vax recommend you empty the tank of water. Even after 45 minutes the water was still quite warm so you have to watch you don't burn yourself.
The accessory holder in the front doesn't quite hold all the accessories, and there is no cord storage. Which is quite annoying.
Other than that it's a good cleaner and will give you plenty of time to clean all that you want. There are also accessories to clean windows, and various pieces to get into tight corners or scrub radiators clean.
Having used my cleaner on our UPVC windows I can say that it gets both windows and door frames very clean.
So what did I like about this?
Lightweight compact Cleans well
What I didn't like?
The cloths get very dirty and will need to be washed between every use. If you need to clean more than one room you'll need more cloths, I think you could use old teatowels as substitutes. No cord storage Not enough storage for all accessories.
Addendum: I love this cleaner!!!
It's now 8 months since I bought this cleaner, and I am happy to report that it is still going strong. I have used it regularly especially to remove muddy pawprints from walls and the leather sofa :)
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Handheld - Water Capacity:-1 - Max Boiler Wattage:1500 - Steam Pressure in Bars:-1 - without Vacuum Function - without Steam Iron Function - without Variable Steam Regulation
I've been considering one of these for a while now, think I will have to look around for one. Good review with some good info, but as previous comments have said, it would be interesting to see what the durability is like. Claire
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Apr 11th, 2006
(Dec 11th, 2006)
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