bit-tech Shopping: Hoover FloorMate SpinScrub H3044 Vacuum

Rating: 8

Time with product: 1 Day

Strengths: Easy to use, easy to clean, works fine on the floors.

Weaknesses: Handle is uncomfortable for me, but okay.It doesn't reach in small areas, like near the toilets in my bathrooms

Summary: Did a nice job cleaning the floors. Definitely can see the "gunk" that was brought up in the used water container. Got most spots... I waited til the floors dried (not long) and went over the pesky spots again, and used my sock a couple of times. But overall it worked great. So nice to avoid all the hands and knees scrubbing I've done since a child. And I ran the machine while the baby was napping. It's as loud as a vacuum, but the baby never awoke. :-)

Rating: 8

Time with product: 1 Week

Strengths: Not too heavy, easy to operate

Weaknesses: Difficult to clean

Summary: I've owned an older version of this floormate before and have really liked it on my hardwood floors. The new one is just as good as the old one and the handle on this new model actually folds down for easy storage if you don't have a tall broom closet. Some people have complained about this as a dry vacuum cleaner, but come on, who buys this to use as a dry vacuum? just sweet the floor first then scrub it with this baby. The best part of using a floor cleaner is that it sucks in the water and squeegee the floor dry as you clean, so you don't have to wait for a long time for the floor to dry like when you use a mop. I'd highly recommend this to people with lots of hardwood or noncarpeted floors to clean. I don't think this works particularly well on tile floors though.

Rating: 8

Time with product:

Strengths: Easy to use, cleans in wet mode very well

Weaknesses: Dry vac is very poor, machine is loud

Summary: I've tried pretty much every hard floor cleaning machine out there, and this is (for me) the best of the lot. The scrubbing brushes are great for getting dirty ceramic tile clean -- machines that lack it just don't have the same cleaning power. There are several pluses. It's easy to use, nicely designed so that it gets into corners easily. The handle flips down for storage. Comes apart easily for cleaning after you're done. Downsides are there as well. The main one is that the dry vac feature is very poor. Don't even bother with it -- use a real vac first, and save this for wet scrubbing and drying. It's also loud -- louder than a typical vac. I only use this on ceramic tile, so I can't say how well it works on other surfaces. It does a great job for me -- my kitchen, foyer, and bathroom floors are the cleanest they have ever been! One last tip -- the Hoover cleaning solution is OK. Smells a bit "industrial" but does a decent job. You can get just as good results using hot water and vinegar or hot water and ammonia (non-suds version). It's a LOT cheaper than the Hoover product.