Customer Reviews

Dirt Devil Spot Scrubber

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(27)

 

 

Oh, how I wish I had checked reviews before I bought this product! Whoever designed this product was apparently a hateful, vengeful person who secretly wants to ruin the day of housewives everywhere. Some of my favorite features of this product are:

When you are cleaning up a disgusting spot of something, this device will randomly spew the dirty water out of the side vents, usually all over your legs as you are crouched over the spot trying to remove it. This happens when the product has a bare tablespoon of dirty water. Would it have been so hard to, I don't know, make the holding tank big enough to hold the dirty water? Or maybe make it where, when slightly full, the dirty water goes ANYWHERE other than on you and your house? Have you ever smelled hot dog urine water that has been steamed out of a vent? That smell will stay in your house for MONTHS, and no amount of spot scrubbing will help.

The scrub brush is pretty much useless, it kind of scrubs the spot, but you have to put so much pressure on the scrubber to make it reach the carpet you end up with a cramp in your wrist. You also can't really get the brush clean, it's in an awkward spot on the device.

You need the strength of a gorilla to pry the plug that keeps the dirty water in the holding tank. (Haha KEEPS it in the tank? What a laugh!) You will have to grab an awkward green tab and yank and pull and curse and...BOOM it pops open and spews that dirty water (what is left of it after the vents steamed it all over you) all over your face.

The price is good, but do you really want to pay money to curse and hate and loath every time your dog makes a piddle on the carpet? This product is poorly designed, I've been using it for 6 months now, and I'm about to throw it in the garbage and buy something else. I won't even give this thing away to someone, there isn't anyone in the world I hate that much.

This is going back! Pros: price is reasonable, easy to figure out and assemble, good suction -- most of the water is removed from carpet. Cons: extremely noisy; parts are difficult to disassemble -- knobs are too small on screw tops while click-on parts stick and it's difficult to get a grip anywhere because of the design, knob on dirty tank is very difficult to open and close, wet or dry; brush seems useless -- most of the scrubbing action comes from manually moving the machine back and forth over the spot; sprayer never did work right no matter how long I held it down; difficult to clean afterward -- one has to remove screws to run water through the suction nozzle, the brush is attached so one must run water over the end of the machine to clean it easily; and finally, I got sprayed with puppy poop water which came out the air flow "out" vent, probably because I moved the machine too vigorously or it got too full (I hadn't used all the allowed solution in the first tank) -- the inside end of the suction tube is very close to the top of the solution in the dirty tank. This is not a happy camper! My advice -- try another spot cleaner!

I purchased this item from a traditional vendor. It was absolutely worthless! It is literally so loud you have to wear hearing protection to use it or your ears ring for several minutes afterward. Most of the water it sucks up gets sprayed back out the exhaust vent and all over your clothes and the room you are using it in. I threw it out after a couple of times using it. Don't waste your money.

I purchased one of these back in January and have used it every day since I opened it! Okay so it's loud, guess what!!! That's because it is so powerful! I get better results using this than with my large upright steam shampooer. With a house full of cats, I am constantly cleaning up after hairballs. For those who don't own a cat ... they throw up constantly because of ingesting so much hair while they are grooming themselves. My house has light colored carpet throughout and I could never get the stains up completely until this little wonder! The only down side is the dirty water reservoir is not as big as I wish it were and I have to empty it constantly. The stopper was hard to remove at first but became easier after time. I show this off to everyone that comes over and remarks about how clean my house looks in spite of so many cats! It is worth any extra effort needed to clean and maintain!

Well, at least this product is going to be in the Smithsonian one day: she looks just so, well, pretty. Those guys just out of electronic product design school really made this little girl beautiful for the prom. BUT oh no! I took her to the prom and, well, she did turn into a pumpkin at midnight.

If you take Dirt Devil out you'll need the following personal accessories: Ear plugs for the Airbus A320 thruster engine sounds she makes while dancing. Pliers to remove the breakable tank cover flap. Ice for sore thumb after pushing that silly sprayer 30 times a minute.

Oh - - you asked about cleaning power. Ok, there was this one spot on the dance floor - low pile carpet and viola! The Cleaning solution is great. But oh, if the carpet guys saw me using this toy they would giggle - - it belongs in the kindergarden play house.

Now remember this: a rug cleaner can look all techy and space age and all. But they all work on one simple early 20th century principle: wet the carpet with a proven cleaning solution and suck up the liquid with the most voracious vacume action possible. Don't be fooled by 21st century cosmetic packaging. You'll get your date home after curfew and her folks won't be any happier than users of this little Devil.

Since I bought this spot cleaner three years ago, it has been an indispensable tool in lifting tough stains out of my carpet. If you own Berber, you know that stains take to it like a magnet to a fridge and are really hard to pry off using traditional cleaners that come in a bottle or can.

The Spot Scrubber makes short order of these stains. I've used it on everything from greasy shoe stains to spilled coffee, and each time the stains come out completely with little to no effort. A few tricks I've learned to get the most value from this machine may help you.

* Saturate the stain with the liquid cleaning solution and wait a full 5 minutes for the cleaner to activate. This is an important step, since it is the liquid cleaner that ultimately works at removing the stain.

* Next, use the revolving brush on the Spot Scrubber with steady even pressure, back and forth from right to left and up to down. This makes sure that the cleaner is thoroughly worked into the carpet fibers and attacks the stain.

* Next, use the vacuum setting on the Spot Scrubber to thoroughly remove the cleaner, moisture and any stain residue.

* I like to use an additional spray bottle with plain water after vacuuming the spot as a rinse aid to remove any residual cleaner. After spraying the water onto the spot a few times, I again vacuum the moisture away.

Following these steps, I have had superb results with the Dirt Devil Spot Scrubber.

A note about the critical reviews here: Without a doubt, this machine has its flaws. One, it's very important to make sure that the dirty water tank is emptied early and often. This will prevent liquid from spraying out of the machine's exhaust vents, as there are no built-in water-proof valves that keep the water locked into the tank. And, two, the machine is indeed very loud. But for small jobs, I believe these faults can be overlooked because it delivers solid results.

This is my second hand held spot cleaner. It works and works well, but you have to understand how to use it (I made this disclaimer because I read the first few reviews which were all negative). Certainly there are pros and cons to this cleaner, but read on...

Pros:
1) Powerful, that's why it's so noisy, or vice versa. The description says it's the industry's most powerful "Hand-Held Extractor". I don't know on what basis they make that claim, but it is certainly powerful.
2) The scrubber does work but you have to be patient and you don't have to use a lot of strength or force. You just need to put it right at the spot and keep it there and move it gently. If you look at it sideways you can see it's doing it's job. Because the scrubber only rotates one way I do it at a 90% angle as well to make sure it hits the stain at a different angle.

Cons:
1) Noisy (cf. powerful above). I don't know if a powerful vacuum can be made quiet, but part of the problem is that this is a handheld, so this can only be held at arm's length at the most from your ear.
2) Small dirty water reservoir. But this is a handheld so there is a limit to the size of it, unless you want to be holding a huge reservoir. People have complained about water spraying out the vents, that happens because the reservoir is full and needs to be emptied.
3) Needs to dissemble to clean. There is no other way around it, but in a way it is a positive because you can just take the plastic parts outside and hose everything off inside and out.

In summary, this is basically a powerful hand-held wet dry vac with a rotating scrubber. It works very well, but it has limitations and the limitations are due to it's specs. For example, it is hand held, so it has to be small and that limits the size of it's reservoir. It's noisy, but that's a factor of the power of its vac. You have to disassemble it to clean it, but that's much better than having components that are attached together and can't be hosed or submerged to clean.

Overall, if cleaning power is more important than ease of use, then this vacuum is for you. For me, once I learned how to use and clean it, it's a no brainer for me to have this more powerful handheld cleaner. I only gave it 4 stars because I too wish it wasn't that noisy.

I am not impressed. To spray the spot you have to push the button 30 times to get it wet (most cleaners let you hold the button down and release when wet enough) because you have to pump it to get water to come out. It is 10X noisier than my full size carpet cleaner. The suction is poor! I dont recommend this one.

I went to Walmart to buy a bottle of spot cleaner, and decided to pick this up. I was a bit leery, with it being the cheapest one, but we are on a budget, and need to get the spots out of the carpet.

The first thing I did when I got home was read the reviews, which didn't fill me with a lot of hope. I decided that for the price, I could stand to give it a shot. I am actually glad I did.

Before using it, I took each piece apart to see just how hard it was to remove the fresh/dirty water tanks and such. After reading how difficult it was, I was a bit shocked at how simple it was. Perhaps they fixed something, but it really was a piece of cake.

There are several spots that have been tough to get out with just cleaner and a rag, and this seems to really help. It removed some of our tougher spots in just a minute or two of work. The brush seemed plenty powerful, though it's not terribly fast. It is fast enough to remove the stains, which is all that really matters.

Now, there is one part that the others definitely nailed. This is like starting up a shop-vac, and then sticking your ear right next to it. May want to invest in some ear plugs to use while operating it.

All in all, I am pleasantly surprised for the price, and it will come in handy as my daughter spills yet more things on the floor.

It does a good job of spot-cleaning traffic areas and pet stains on my carpet, but it takes a LOT of scrubbing back and forth followed by a LOT of extraction to get the job done. Also, I recommend after cleaning and extracting the solution, spray pure water on the area and extract again in order to remove as much of the cleaning agent as possible -- an uncle in the floor care business told me years ago the most important part of cleaning anything is removing the cleaning agent afterwards.

In fact, I now typically use this machine only for RINSING the carpet after spot-cleaning the stain manually with a cloth and as little cleaning agent as possible -- then I use the Dirt Devil machine with only pure water to rinse and extract.

With any consumer appliance for carpet cleaning, including a rental machine, the carpet will take longer to dry than when it is cleaned by a commercial carpet cleaning service because their machines have much more powerful extraction -- large commercial carpet cleaning machines remove over 95% of the liquid they used.