We have a steam cleaner and I try to use it every 6 months or so. How often do you steam clean your carpets? It's amazing how much dirt comes up even though we take off our shoes when we come into the house!!

OK you guys reminded me that I have this Hoover SteamVac sitting in our living room that has been broken for months - we bought ourselves a new one but I hate to throw this away just because the clean water tank has a leak. So now I have my boyfriend in the kitchen sealing up the leak and I ordered the $5 replacement valve on the web (which cost $12 to ship!!). Anyway, now we can at least donate it to charity once we get it working again. Maybe a friend of ours will take it ...

We use a Rug Doctor every 3 months. We do not use the cleaners for it, though. We use vinegar, Simple Green, or plain water, depends on how bad a stain is.


Funny, we have a Hoover SteamVac sitting in the back room. Motor went *poof* on it. The Rug Doctor did better than the Hoover, though.

We got a Bissell to replace the Hoover and actually the Hoover seems to have worked better than the Bissell. Parts did fail on the SteamVac - we had to get a new brush set and are now replacing that valve but in general it seemed to suck up dirt far better than the Bissell did. We're just going with the Bissell since that Hoover was not holding together very well.

We have a little hand held spot cleaner too, that you put down on a spot and leave it there for 5 minutes and it cleans up the spot. That's also a Bissell.

We don't steam clean. Having wet carpets for several hours in a high humidity area leads to mold growth. Not a great trade off for stain removal.

We spot clean and occasionally will have Chem-Dri come in and do a quick job (whatever it is they use dries in under an hour and it works).

I'd prefer to get rid of the carpet entirely and put in hard floors. Maybe after that ephemeral tax rebate...

Yes agreed steam is the best mode of dry cleaning.Whether it is furniture,walls,carpets or for the matter a steam bath.

I'm afraid of dry cleaning chemical types - but I have the luxury of living in a VERY dry area. We were talking about this in my "do your bathroom towels dry overnight" thread in my low carb forum So if we steam clean our carpets here, they dry in under an hour. So we get super clean carpets, using just water and safe detergent (or heck just water alone sometimes) and then POOF they're dry.

The more I hear about these humid areas, the scarier it sounds. I can't imagine living in a moldy house!! I imagine there must be some benefits though

Lynn- Have you seen the new steamers that dry as they clean? They seem to do a pretty good job. Borrowed a friend's a few times.

When we used the Rug Doctor, we turn on all the ceiling fans, high setting, and also place box fans around the room. For the winter, we're lucky as the heat registers are at the bottom of the wall and the hot air goes right across the carpet.

Using vinegar in the water can dramatically reduce the chance of mold/mildew attacking the carpet, though I agree that hard floors will nearly eliminate the risk totally.

Dry as they clean sounds like a great idea!!

The Scooba uses vinegar plus water as one of its standard mixes

OK we FINALLY repaired our old steam cleaner and I hauled it downstairs into the basement. I didn't want to use our "regular" steam cleaner on the basement carpet because we have 2 cats and this thing is just grody. I didn't want the good cleaner gunked up with this stuff. But now that we have a "junk steam cleaner" I was quite happy to get that carpet clean!

And now it smells SO much nicer down in the basement, which is where my dance dance revolution setup is and the Bowflex. It's also where Bob's dart area is set up. So this is good for so many reasons!

if i had a steam cleaner I would probably use it bimonthly with my asthma and allergies.

I want to get a steam cleaner to clean my wood and tile floors and other surfaces.

Jase - you can rent them at many grocery stores for not a lot of money! Maybe go in with some friends on a daily rental and all share it, to save on the money?

Jase-
I just picked up a new handheld steamer from ALDI of all places. I had a Shark Steamer, it was horrible, didnt work at all from the word Go.

This one is a Crofton and comes with all sorts of attachments for cleaning everything from windows to walls to toilets. I love it.

While you do still need to use a sponge or towel for some things, it does a great job of blasting gunk out of really hard to reach places. Another plus is that it does an even better job on crayon and other wall marks than the Magic Eraser.

OK I just steam cleaned the downstairs living room, because I was doing yoga and decided I wanted the carpet as clean as it could be. It's amazing how much brown gunk comes up from a steam cleaning, from a just-vacuumed carpet!! And we don't wear shoes in the house either - we take off our shoes when we come into the house. Where does this dirt come from?

So things are fresher and cleaner

Lisa, I have the same problem, gunk coming up all the time.

We moved into this house after a family who had had quite a few animals, plus a lot of foot traffic. After cleaning, the carpet looks wonderful for all of two days at the most. Then the stains begin to come back, always in the same areas.

We assume that the dirt is down in the padding under the carpet. We cannot afford to remove the carpet right now, but you better believe that when we can this whole thing is going bye-bye!

Well I have to believe that each cleaning draws out another percentage of the dirt so if I keep this up eventually it'll get cleaner

I wish there was some way to quantify the "percent dirt" in the water I bring up, so I could tell if it is getting cleaner. I thought about taking pictures (being the documentation person I am) but I'm not sure that I could get the lighting exactly the same each time ...