I bought this Bissell carpet cleaner after returning the carpet cleaner that I originally tried, the Hoover Smartwash Automatic Carpet Cleaner model FH52000. You can see my review of the Hoover Smartwash at the following link: https://www.amazon.com/review/ROS4FTWF2IDKH/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B07DTKXTXV The main selling point of the Hoover Smartwash is that it is ridiculously easy to use. The side benefit to it is that it's also super easy to clean. After using that, you'll be spoiled. Which leads me to my review of this Bissell Proheat model... This Bissell beats the Hoover Smartwash in cleaning. It was able to get my carpets cleaner, quicker. The Hoover Smartwash is not bad, mind you. It's just that this Bissell is better. If you want one of the best possible cleans, you should get this one. If I had to rate the cleaning performance of both, I'd give this Bissell a 9 out of 10, and I'd give the Hoover Smartwash an 8 out of 10. On youtube, you can even see comparisons where this Bissell model did better than commercial quality models like the Bissell Big Green Machine. Right now (as of the beginning of 2020), it seems to be the best model available, period, for actually cleaning carpets. Awesome! One thing to keep in mind, though, is that these performance comparisons are just looking at how the carpet looks after the same number of passes forwards and backwards over the stain. Pretty much all of the carpet cleaners will be able to get rid of a stain if you work at it long enough (more passes). That might mean using a manual pre-wash first. Or it might mean going over the stain many more times. Or you can simply double the amount of liquid carpet cleaner you use. So I think both the Bissell and the Hoover can clean more or less equally well, if you're willing to work at it a bit more with the Hoover. I didn't think I'd like the "spot clean" feature of this Bissell model, though. That's where it shoots a stream of cleaning fluid right at a spot to soak it in. But I have to say, it's a great feature. Granted, I could just get a spray bottle and do it manually. But anything to make my life easier is a good idea. Where this Bissell product really needs to improve is in clean-out. I found it was so confusing and tedious to clean out this carpet cleaner, especially compared to the Hoover Smartwash. The Smartwash required no instructions and was much quicker, had far less steps, less parts, less complication. This Bissell carpet cleaner has two pieces housing the brushes, for example. The Hoover Smartwash only has one. Less parts to clean! And on the Bissell, when I went to remove the top one, it wasn't obvious what I had to do. After doing the wrong thing a couple times, I finally just pulled at it from the back piece, and it came off. But pulling at pieces at random is hardly a good thing to train your customers to do, right? The second part of the brush housing came off only after I read the instruction manual. And the manual wasn't terribly clear about it. You have to press down on two button-like things at the same time. Complicated and non-intuitive, requiring squinting and carefully reading and re-reading the manual. After I removed the second of the two brush housing pieces, it leaked cleaning fluid all over the place. Luckily this was on the tiles in my bathroom, because I had the common sense to bring it there first, just in case. The manual didn't tell me to expect that, though. It certainly should have, but it certainly didn't! Now, cleaning the two brush housing pieces was not a big deal, but a little more complicated than it should be. Again, the Hoover Smartwash was easier in this regard, because you could pour water directly into the hole at the narrow end, and it would push out all the gunk at the wide end. And then you could turn it around and run water through the wide end as well, in reverse. But this Bissell product only lets you pour water in the wide end. The hole at the narrow end is perpendicular to the unit, preventing you from using it to flush it out. That made cleaning it more difficult, more time consuming, and not as thorough. To get it completely clean, it required a special tool that they include with the unit. Just flushing it with water wasn't good enough. Whereas, the Hoover Smartwash required no such tool and was super easy to flush out! With the two brush housing pieces cleaned, I then tried to put them back onto the machine. The first piece was fine. I just put it on and heard it click into place. Simple enough. But the second piece? Oh my god! You can't be serious! It was so confusing. Nothing I did worked to get that piece on. I was pressing down firmly enough the thing was about to snap. I tried sliding it on. I tried pressing it on. I tried smacking it on the top, on the end, etc. Nothing worked. I was ready to say this piece was defective. But then I squinted at and re-read the manual again. They show only one picture, and it really doesn't depict the action that you need to perform. They have one very vague sentence telling you what to do. And finally, I figured it out: You're supposed to rotate the piece, placing the bottom edge into the front lip thingy first, and then rotate it as if it was a hinge. But it's not a hinge! And there's no indication that it was designed to be a hinge! If you keep rotating it, it will snap in correctly. To my utter astonishment, it worked. Wow! There's really no reason a normal human being would expect it to work that way. None. I'm an electrical engineer, and I found it absurd and confounding. Then came cleaning out the waste water collection jar. I pulled it out just fine. It didn't leak. Good so far. I took it over to my toilet to dump it out. I saw a little rubber stopper at the top, off-side and not quite at the top of the jar. So I figured, no, that can't be where they want me to pour it out from. I mean, you're expecting a screw cap of some sort, with some sort of lip to pour from. But there is none. So you're thinking, that can't be where you pour from. It's just going to trickle right down the edge of the jar, since it has no lip. Ewww. No, that can't be right. It's gotta be something else. So I looked around and saw on the bottom of the collection jar there was a huge round screw-cap-like piece. Awesome. That must be it, right? Well, I unscrewed it and realized it was just a collar piece, not a lid. The collar piece came off, but it didn't open up the bottom of it. Apparently you have to reach in and pull out the overflow assembly at this point. I was struggling to figure out how to do that. Nothing I grabbed worked, no matter how hard I pulled at it. It was just stuck in there good. While I was doing this, the waste water inside came out on occasion as it tilted from side to side. Apparently, the bottom piece is actually open to the inside. Yeah, that murky water can come right out the bottom even without unscrewing anything, just by tilting it the wrong way! Oh man. Are you kidding me? Who designed this? A waste collection jar should be leak-proof! This one isn't. It will leak quite a lot if you just tilt it or jostle it. So I went to the manual again. I read it, squinted, re-read it, and I knew what to do. Apparently you do use that rubber stopper on the top to empty the thing out first. Who knew? It isn't a real cap, just a stopper. It has no "lip" preventing waste water from trickling down the container. There's no pour nozzle. And that rubber stopper is designed to just hang from the container. It doesn't stay out of the way once you open it. That just makes it messy to pour out. The waste water is going to splash against that stopper. I honestly don't get it. Why would they design it like this? To remove the overflow mechanism from the bottom of the collection jar in order to clean it, you have to do this really awkward, non-intuitive thing to pull it out. I tried reaching in and pulling at it hard, but that didn't work. Y
