Melody’s review of the Hoover SteamVac Agility Lavender

I heartily recommend the Hoover SteamVac Agility carpet cleaner. It has been a great help this past week --- My dog has had an intestinal bug, and the poor thing has been sick. A lot. He, unfortunately, thinks the living room carpet is the proper place to, well, you know.

It was a challenge to decide which carpet-cleaning machine to buy. Thanks to all of you here at Epinions, I knew that we would be better off with the Hoover line (Thanks, everyone!). The Agility™ seems to be the popularly-priced, 'best-featured for the money' model. You can spend almost $85 more for the top-of the line Hoover carpet cleaner (SteamVac™ Dual V™ Widepath™ ). What you get is a slightly wider cleaning swath, 3 feet more of cord, an extra rotating brush in the nozzle, and an attachment for cleaning hard floors. And, oh yes, Auto-Rinse. The lesser Hoover (SteamVac™) didn't seem to have enough features or power. It has a shorter cord, a smaller motor, and no hand tools to do upholstered furniture (that was important to me). So it seemed that the Agility balanced the price/feature equation the best for me.

(BTW, at http://www.hoover.com/db/xq/asp.hvrCompare/CatID.6/qx/DeepCleaner.htm, you can select which Hoover deep cleaners you wish to compare and see a list of specifications and features. It really helps a lot.)

When I filled out the Registration form, I noticed that Hoover asked me to respond to "I am willing to give up some quality for a lower price." with check boxes labeled "Agree" and "Disagree". I had to check "Agree" because that's exactly what I had done. And this is a very important consumer lesson: you have to decide for yourself what you can afford and what you are willing to pay for. Sure, I would rather that the carpet cleaner had more metal parts, with machined connectors and metal latches. But, you know what? I don't think I can afford a $600 machine right now! The Agility? It's all plastic, and you know that sooner or later that little plastic snap-latch is gonna break. However, it looks like that Hoover has a good parts order department on-line. That's a comfort.

We were pleasantly surprised with the packaging. There's no assembly needed. Just unfold the handle, fill the reservoir with cleaning solution and hot tap water, plug 'er in, and you are ready to clean carpet.

The Agility does a very nice job on our carpets. The worst is the 30-year-old red shag in the living room (yeah, I know. Got to replace that. Later). Honestly, that carpet looks better now than it has looked in years. The brushes do a good job of resetting the carpet nap and the 12-amp motor gives you enough power to get the cleaning solution up.

I would say that the living room carpet looks better than when we last had it done by a professional steam-cleaning company. And I did a better job picking up the water. It dried within 4-5 hours --- not overnight!

I like that the Agility's cleaning solution reservoir has the measuring cup built in. It's easy to fill and snap back on the machine. To me, this is a much better way to do this than to run a hose from the faucet to the carpet cleaner.

CAUTION: Don't roll the cleaner around with a full reservoir. It will leak every time you hit a bump. Set up the cleaner where you want to start cleaning and bring the filled reservoir in from the kitchen.

Another tip: Spray solution on a forward stroke, vacuum it up on the back stroke. Then go over the wet area until you don't see any more water coming up (usually 3 strokes). For heavily soiled areas, use the "Clean Surge" feature to lay down extra cleaning solution.

The Agility is fairly easy to clean up. There's a place on the cap of the pick-up fluid reservoir that the Hoover engineers need to re-think (it traps lint around a screw-head), but everything else cleans up at the kitchen sink or with a damp paper towel. Looks like it will be great for quick clean-ups.

All-in-all, we are very impressed with our new Hoover.

Recommended
Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 204.00