Hoover PowerDash Pet Compact Carpet Cleaner Machine, Lightweight Shampooer Machine, Pair with a Hoover Carpet Cleaner Solution for a Bright, Refreshed Home

We've got white carpeting in our living/dining area and upstairs in the hallway and master bedroom. The carpet was not new when we bought the house, but had been cleaned, and looked great. We moved in with our three dogs and our two cats, and somehow, we haven't figured out what caused it, the carpet began to get a bit dirty, especially in areas where our biggest dog (Zeus, an 85 pound teddy bear) prefers to sleep.Then, a few months ago, my elderly mother moved in with us, and she has two small dogs who decided to come along for the ride. One of those two dogs (Katie, a Feist dog who looks like a tiny deer more than anything else,) isn't housebroken. Is. Not. Housebroke. Not at all. Not even a little bit. She *was* housebroken at my mom's house, before Mom moved in with us, but Katie is a shelter dog, and we don't know if she was abused or just severely neglected before the shelter got her, but "timid" doesn't even begin to describe this dog. She's not afraid of *us* anymore, and gets along great with the other dogs, but fear is her steadfast companion, and for whatever reason, she has decided that one thing to be afraid of is the very idea of going outside without my mom.The people who owned this house before we did also had a small dog. I don't know how well housebroken that dog was, but, I used to work for a carpet cleaning company, and one thing I learned there is about "wicking." What can happen is, let's say that your dog--or our Katie--pees on the carpet and happens to pee where some other dog once peed on the carpet too. Not only can Katie leave a stain, but, the moisture can actually cause the stain from the *old* pee to get wicked back up to the surface, just the same way that oil is wicked up in a lantern to burn by the .... well, by the wick.So apparently Katie is pretty good at finding old pee stains because very often, where she chooses to pee we not only get her new pee stain, but another stain as well, with brown edges. Nice, right? Our white carpet quickly became white, yellow, brown, and ugh, colors. And yes, in this case, "ugh" is a color.I was desperate. We can't afford new carpet and no one in their right mind would buy new carpet before the final dog was housebroken anyway, but if anyone had come over to visit with the carpet looking like this... okay, I was about to say I would have died of embarrassment but that would be overstating my degree of concern about what other people think by about a million degrees. Still, we're pretty fond of this house (a mid century modern) and its looks, and we wouldn't want the carpet to be the thing people remembered the most about the house, especially not when there's a backyard with 5 dogs pooping in it for them to remember instead. (Flies. We have flies. Even though we scoop, we have flies.)Enter this little machine. For the price, I have to tell ya, I wasn't expecting *too* much. Then again, I was expecting *something* or I wouldn't have bought it.What I got was, in fact, a lot more than I was expecting, I can tell you that.I followed the quick start guide and put it together; all very simple.I filled the water tank with water and a little of the detergent that came with it, plugged the machine in, and fired it up, after first tempering my husband and mother's expectations by letting them know that it was possible that it wouldn't do anything except make the wicking problem even worse, and advising them that for that reason, I was going to test just a small area.Listen... well, no, just read. No wicking problem. New stains are gone. Old stains are gone. Does the carpet look brand new again? Well, no. But it looks as good as it does when we moved in here.The machine spits the water into the carpet, rub-a-dub-dubs it however much you want it to, and then when you're ready, it sucks the water back out again, and applies some heat to help start it on its way to getting dry again. Easy as can be. In fact, I'm afraid to say this because we ARE talking about housework here but it's actually kind of.... well.... fun. I don't SAY that about housework. But the thing is that it's not housework I hate. In fact, I *love* housework when it's not overly strenuous, doesn't make me sweat, and I can look at what I've just done and really tell that I DID something, and this machine covers all those points. And for the price? Well.All I can say is that it's one of the best purchases I've ever made, and if you could see my buying-history, and thank god you can't, you'd realize what a huge statement that is for me to say. There may be some carpet cleaning jobs it wouldn't be recommended for, but not any carpet cleaning jobs that *I* would ever do. That's a fact.I love this thing. I love it so much I'm going to name it. I just haven't chosen the perfect name yet. I'm thinking "Slosh," though. Even though it doesn't. Slosh, that is.Oh yeah, emptying out the dirty water so that you can put in some nice clean water and clean more carpet is easy as can be, also.And be sure and vacuum first if you have pets. I didn't because I was in such a hurry to try this bad mofo out, and I was rewarded by having the machine spit out a couple of (quite clean!) hairballs while I was doing my test area. So yeah. Vacuum first.Buy this. This is the droid you're looking for.

I just got it today after work and I immediately used it. I have a little old lady dog who has accidents when I’m not home. It’s not her fault she can’t help it buttt you can definitely smell it. I tried to scrub and spray with cleaner and it definitely didn’t work so I finally decided to get a carpet cleaner. This is actually amazing. It is super simple to use and cleans fast. I have never shampooed carpet before but this was honestly really easy to understand and use. I went over my whole living room 2 times and I notice a difference in the color of water and the cord length is long enough to go all over my living room. I definitely want to go over it more times I just couldn’t go anymore because I have work tomorrow. But I love this and i definitely think it’s worth the money.

I bought this thing on the basis of all the good reviews it got. I had a larger Bissell machine for many years and I was largely satisfied with it. But I wanted something a little more compact and lighter.Pros: This thing really is more like a slightly heavier, regular vacuum cleaner in use, which means it is an awful lot easier to push around. It seems to clean about as well as my big beast of a Bissell did, maybe even a bit better, judging by how much filthy water it ultimately pulled up from my carpet. The routine cleaning of the machine, rinsing out the parts etc. after you are done using it seems fairly easy, a bit easier than my old Bissell because you can take the suction head off easily and run it under the sink and it was reasonably easy to pull the inevitable bits of dog hair and carpet fuzz off the rollers. It was noisy, but not much noisier than my old machine.Cons: Water is heavy, and a big reason why this thing is lighter and easier to use is that the water tanks are much smaller. The water dispenser bottle is like two Nalgene bottles put together, which means you get less than 10 minutes of run time with the water spraying. So you have to stop, refill the clean water and empty the dirty water tank much more frequently than you will with a larger machine. If you are cleaning a very big room nowhere near a sink or tub, that will get old soon. The brush head is narrower as well, meaning more passes are required to clean the same area. So buying something like for most people is going to be a kind of a pick-your-poison thing. Either you can get a big heavy machine that is more work to push around or something lighter that requires more trips to the sink and so will take you a fair bit more time to handle a large area.If you have a huge house full of wall-to-wall carpet with kids and dogs etc. this is probably not the machine for you. If you have a few area rugs that you want to give a deep clean once or twice a year, this will be ideal. If you are somewhere between these two extremes, you just need to decide what is more important to you.It seems fairly well built for the price, which is not the same thing as actually heavy-duty. It strikes me as something that should last a while if it gets only occasional use and you are reasonably gentle with it. But if you are pulling this out every week, that may be asking a lot of something this inexpensive.So far, I have only discovered two obvious design flaws: (1) There is actually a small lip around the drain plug you use to drain the water from the dirty water tank, which makes it needlessly difficult to get the very last fraction of an ounce of water out of the dirty water tank. This is really only annoying when you clean the machine to put it away, it means that part will take forever to dry. (2) The power cord is attached to the bottom of the machine, not up by the handle. It should have some kind of clip to keep it up out of the way, and I found that if I wasn't careful I'd keep running over the cord. It would cost literally no money to put a clip for the cord up by the handle, but I guess I will be putting a zip tie on it instead.BTW, having had one of these home carpet cleaning machines for years, the most important tip I can give anybody just starting with one of these things is this: NEVER just run the soap/water solution through the machine and stop. Not only is the job only half done, but worse, the soap residue will dry inside the hoses and mechanism and eventually clog everything up and ruin the machine.Instead, you want to rinse out the clean/water soap mix thing and then run plain water through the machine at least 2x as much as the soap loads. So if you put down 3 loads of soap, plan on running 6 loads of clear water minimum through the machine to get all of that soap you laid down back out of the carpet. As you will soon see, the plain hot water will continue to pull out tons of additional dirt from the carpet along with the soap, and you want the carpet soap out of the carpet before you stop anyway.How do you know when you are done? You should keep going, using just plain water at least until you aren't seeing lots of soaping foam coming back out of the carpet, and ideally until the water you are pulling from the carpet is no longer utterly filthy. If the dirty water still has some dirt in it, but it is no longer black as coal and you can start to see through it, that is when you should be about done. And then run the machine over the whole carpet again without any clear water in it to suck up any residual water in the carpet. That will help the carpet dry more quickly.Here was my experience in cleaning an admittedly filthy 8x10 foot rug. First I needed just under two full loads of the soap/water mix to cover the entire carpet. Then I needed to run another 4 loads of plain water to largely remove the soap from the carpet. Then I ran the machine empty over the entire rug several times to get the residual water out of the carpet. All in, it took quite a while and was a fair bit of work, but the end result was excellent, the carpet looks a whole lot better than it did.Overall, I recommend this thing, it is not for everybody, but it should fit the bill for a lot of people.