Shampooing the carpet with a Hoover Steamvac 5200

Our new steamvac arrived yesterday and I couldn't wait to start using it. It's about 8 steps to put it together, and its not really hard. The unit itself is mostly plastic but rolls smooth and feels pretty solid. We chose to use a professional cleaning solution other than the Hoover brand, as it was recommended by our local vacuum store. It has a strange smell, but seems to work pretty well.

We filled the main tank with very hot tap water (not boiling) and put in the cleaning solution. For Hoover soap you use 5 oz per gallon of water. For this professional cleaner solution we use 1 oz per gallon of water. It's very concentrated.

The process is to squeeze the main trigger as you push forward, which drops the cleaning solution on the carpet. Then you let go of the trigger as you pull backwards over the path you just made and it sucks up the water and dirt. You may have seen video demonstrations showing a stripe of clean carpet next to dirty carpet. That didn't happen for us. While it was noticably a different color, it was actually darker (we have light carpet), and while the collection tank did have some grayish brown water in it, it wasn't a black mess of gunk like I've read about. Apparently our carpets weren't as dirty as I thought (even though it had been 10 years since we'd lived there and never shampooed them) so our Dyson DC 25 ball vacuum is obviously doing a great job. We did vacuum the carpet before cleaning as per the instructions.

It took 4 tank refills to do the entire room, which is 26 x 14. Changing the tank is easy and wasn't a problem. Emptying the collection tank is also easy. The biggest hassle is moving all the furniture around. We did one side of the room, waited for the carpet to dry a little, then moved everything over and worked on the other side. Amazingly the carpet wasn't really super wet. In fact, it felt almost dry right away. We did our cleaning in the evening so it could dry overnight, but I'm sure it was completely dry within an hour or so. That was a pleasant surprise.

When we were finished we had a room full of clean carpet. Visibly it looked like a really good vacuuming job, but it was more than that. You could run your hand across the top and feel the new softness, the nap was raised up, and it just felt cleaner. I was hoping for a change in carpet color, but then again, if you actually change your carpet from dark to light, you were living with dangerously filthy carpets.

I'm going to try to do this process at least annually, hopefully every 6 months. Using the machine is fun and easy, but moving furniture is a pain.

We bought our unit at Amazon for $170 and free shipping. It comes with a Hoover cleaning solution, all instructions and necessary parts.