Rug Doctor No More!

Each year -- when just the right amount dirt, grit, blood, vomit, dog pee and food stains have ravaged our contractor-grade beige carpets -- we run to the local grocery store and rent the Rug Doctor.

Renting the Rug Doctor is no small task. The machine itself is awkwardly heavy with a bizarre weight distribution. No matter how I position myself, I've yet to lift one into my van without later thinking "I shouldn't have done that."

Then you have to buy all the chemicals. You really need only two chemicals but they sucker you into buying the spot remover for pre-treating those tough, set-in stains. I'm sorry, but if dragging a fifty-pound monster that spews soap and hot water, abuses the carpet with rotating scrubby death, then sucks out the dirty water with the power of a jet engine doesn't get out the spot, neither will a few extra squirts from a nine-dollar bottle of the same exact soap.

The main two chemicals you need are the cleaning solution and the anti-foaming agent, although I've never understood the anti-foaming bit. I know you put it in the dirty water collection container to keep the dirty water from sudsing over and wrecking the Rug Doctor, but I can't help feeling foolish spending $20 for a chemical whose sole purpose is to keep the shampoo I just spent $40 on from foaming. Seems cosmically counter-productive to me.

And for all the size, weight and girth of the machine, it has a really small bladder. Seriously, I've known hamsters with greater constitutions. Seems like every three sweeps along the carpet requires either the emptying of the dirty water or the refilling of the cleaning solution.

Anyway, as the title of this post suggests, we no longer need to rent the Rug Doctor. It can stay forever chained in its cage at the grocery store with its siblings.

We are now proud owners of the Bissell ProHeat CleanShot 2x. For $200, we were able to purchase not only our liberation from the rentable monstrosity -- which, let's face it, probably holds lingering traces of a hundred other families' grit, grime and spilled fluids -- but also the freedom to deep clean our carpets at whim.

With a carefree filling of a tank with water and the loading of only one concentrated cleaning solution, we are free to attack whatever carpet-contaminating catastrophe comes our way.

The best part? No anti-foaming agent!


© 2010 Mark Feggeler