BISSELL® Big Green® Professional Carpet Cleaner with XL DirtLifter PowerBrush, 9-inch Long Reach Hose, 6-inch Tough Stain Tool, Includes BISSELL PRO MAX Formula with Stain Protect Technology

It's probably one of the best cleaning tools I had in terms of carpet despite all the directions I didn't read. If you're reading this review and not the type to read directions carefully, I would suggest you read my review right now. First of all, you're going to encounter a cardboard insert at the front end of the nozzle, remove that, and open the dirty water tank, you'll find your 3 free bottles of cleaning agent in there. Don't be like me and find them in dirty water, and running your whole carpet with probably 40% efficiency because of the cardboard in the nozzle.My cat was scared, dog is just always timid, but they were okay with me cleaning. Just note that it's pretty loud, but not like manufacturing noise level, just your regular vacuum loud. The rollers at the bottom grab any fur that your normal vacuum or fur rakes can't grab so that's really a plus. The spray is really easy to tell if it's working because of the little circle flow meter, letting you know if you still have cleaning agent there or not. Once the flow meter stops moving, you need to grab the tank and refill.It won't really leak as long as you don't tilt anything and all lids are closed well. Make sure your dirty water tank isn't fully unlocked or the lid is going to come off from the tank itself. A full motion forward is a full unlock, anything between will keep the tank and lid together. There will be a small point to note between the dirty tank and nozzle where you'll notice dirty water lingers around, simply because it is a passage way for the suction of the nozzle to tank.Everything is pretty self-explanatory other than that, the trigger is great, you push pulling and spraying, and pull to brush and suction. I did my carpet around 2.5 times (because I left the cardboard in the nozzle for the first time LOL). and it did it's justice. By the last time, the water was still full of grime and brown, looking like dirt water, but you can see it was significantly better than the first load of dirty water. If you really want your carpet to be clean, you would probably need to run this 8~10 times in a short span, in addition to frequency touch-ups.The enzyme cleaner included does do the job cleaning but if your carpet is stained with pet urine, I would really look into different methods of cleaning. After running 2.5 times, keeping in mind I really focused on affected areas with pet urine and odor, it didn't really remove all the scent. I used the preclean stain remover from bissell on those affected areas prior to the whole floor cleaning but no luck. I was able to smell my girlfriend's dog's urine, and his body odor where he lays on the carpet. It did cleanly remove the odor of his saliva though.What I did with the urine smell was... NOT RECOMMENDED by the directions but, I put the whole cleaning concentration on the affected spot, drizzled with warm water and scrubbed it. I would them suck up the whole section with this machine, and repeat a few times. Note, the concentration is made to dilute a lot, so you would have to water down the section multiple times. I know this cleaning solution is made with pet friendly ingredients but that's only as directed for proper usage. Please do this at your own risk, but as a result, his urine smell was gone ONLY from the spot I did the direct concentration treatment.On the other hand, stains are gone on the first try with the addition of the pretreatment stain remover from Bissell used. The above experience was just my room alone, and my sister used it for the living room and the smell of urine was gone (due to a puppy peeing everywhere) and all the stains were no longer visible. You could barely smell the urine too, probably because she used to carpet clean every week with a different machine. She did note, this machine is a lot better than the other competitors, smaller units (obviously speaking). But this is definitely worth the investment.Cleaning the unit seems pretty easy, I just haven't touched the brush section, which seems a little more difficult. The tanks were very easy, you just need to remove the screws in front and you'll get the nozzle portion out. Maybe I'll follow up on this review when I do try to clean the brushing section, however, everything else is very easy and self explanatory.

The most important adjetive for this machine is, AMAZING! First, I'd like to recommend anyone researching this or any product... Read reviews. The good and the bad! Then, look for the trends in those reviews and from there, determine for YOU what is important versus what is not important. A handful of bad reviews that involve complaining about things that have nothing to do with the product specifically (i.e. packaging, delivery, etc) or a small percentage of reviews that have minor "breaks" or other minor problems versus the hundreds or better yet, thousands of great reviews on the same product, those "bad" reviews may need to be taken lightly. Unless, of course, those things are important to you. Do consider this. It doesn't matter how a product is made (assembly line or hand made), there will ALWAYS be faults. No matter the company or how good the product is overall. Obviously, the fewer problems the better but if you are seeing hundreds or thousands of good reviews to a few dozen or so negative, then that would be a reasonable percentage of errors with any good to great product. I know some people will have multiple bad experiences with the same product where others have no issues. There are a multitude of reasons that could happen but look for the overall, not just that one review. That said, I recommend and do this myself, but when looking for trends, if the bad reviews are all because something breaks but maybe its a different piece each time, then there may be an obvious trend. I would possibly take that into consideration. It may not make my decision for me, but the trend of what users say about the product is what I'm looking for and it's paid off for me quite well. Bottom line of what I'm trying to say is, don't just look at one or two reviews and don't just look at the good or the bad, but rather review as best as you are comfortable with on both ends of the spectrum and decide what trends you find and how those trends impact your decisions. For me, reading actual buyers/users reviews are better in almost all circumstances then any lab testing or any company that does product reviewing. With that, I have started my research with companyreviews, but in the end, WE'RE the end user! It is our perspective and experience that matters most. I'd rather gain real world end user perspective then read an article that may or may not be paid for to make a statement one way or the other.On to my review. I have to say this first. When I was researching and reading reviews, my first thought, when I decided I was gonna make this purchase, was "I hope my money doesn't go to waste, but if I get even one great cleaning, that is better than I could pay any over priced "professional" with a oversized "vaccum" in their van, that doesn't even lift out the dirt but just wets the floor and kinda cleans. Then IT'S WORTH IT." I mean not to offended any professional out there but simple soaping the floor and suctioning it up isn't cleaning. That's multiple experiences and eventually, history doesn't lie.Now, I did follow the recommendation of at least one reviewer in this review group that doubled up on the solution, and it worked. I'm not recommending that for you. Just telling you my experience and what worked for me.Now I know you saw the pictures and probably felt ill just looking at that floor. Obviously, we thought so too. It's disgusting and thus we purchased the Big Green Machine. We can compare this unit to the many other ways we've tried to keep carpet clean in companies paid and products purchased and nothing else has come close to this.We have SEVERAL pets to which I won't mention how many but I will say I don't have enough fingers to count them all. We love our fur babies and other pets. We also like having a clean floor and clean house. The floor is the biggest battle in our household.Nothing is more off putting then walking into someone's house and it wreaks of animal urine. But when it's your own home and everytime you come home it smells. YUCK! Multiply that smell by 5 and and that is what anyone else coming into your home smells. We've been there. We were just there. We didn't want to host anything because of the floors. But now, I can very happily and more than confidently say that we've found our cure. This machine is just straight up, Amazing. I've never had a "professional" even come close to cleaning carpets as well as this BIG Green does. If I could find a professional to do this it would almost absolutely cost more than this machine, but I can get multiple uses out of this, as long as well cared for. You can see it for yourself in my posted pics. That dirty floor there is several months of pet stains because the moment we moved into this house my first dog discovered the location of the previous tenant's dog's "place" within less than 5 minutes being in this home. We even waited outside with our dogs before going in to this house for the first time, while they all "did their business" and still she started this disgusting trend. So let's chalk it up to this. More than a handful of household free roaming pets and 11, that's right, ELEVEN months of this.So here's what we did. Machine arrived as quoted at time of purchase. That very next available day off, Saturday, I carefully went through the included manual and honestly, this machine looks like it could or should be difficult, but it truly isn't. Very easy to unpack, assemble, dis-assemble, and re-assemble again. That's important as you will have to empty this unit and refill with clean solution every one gallon. VERY easy to push/pull. Don't leave solution in tank or in machine. Keep all parts clean and dry when in storage. That's how I've best kept any product that uses liquids with electrical devices. Never store liquids in the machine or attachments when not in use. Unfortunately sometimes that means tossing any leftover portions unless you wish to find another way to store the liquid. Diluted solution is not recommended to be put back in with concentrate as number one, it likely won't fit, and number two, you'll ruin the concentration level of the original solvent. Next, I went to work on the floor. Now, I do have to say many people and these products suggest to pretreat. I did NOT pretreat. I wanted to see how this product (with double amount solution) would actually hold up. I started with a small space (4' x 4' landing) and immediately could see the difference. Then when I started the first trip down the hallway, my wife suggested to take before and after photos. That's what you find above. My process with doing this was to make a forward pass (I divided the hallway into 3 sections. Moving side to side the up. Closest, middle, furthest). While moving forward, I moved the machine steady at about 1 inch a second or slower. I know that seems slow but look at it. It works well. Then on the backwards pass/pull, I moved at the same pace where the carpet was heavily soiled, but where it wasn't pet stained I went about 3 inches per second. This may sound slow but consider that you have to let the solution get into the carpet and let the machine do its job. No product can do that if you rush through it. And dont force it. Let it do it job. You just steer it and place solution accordingly. On the forward pass, I held the trigger to spray the entire distance, then on the backwards pull I only held the trigger where stains resided. The suction is at the very front of the unit and collects everything on the backwards pull. Where heavy solution was applied, another slow pass, without pulling the trigger, will gather up about 95% of the moisture. That said I did make 2-3 passes forward and back with applying solution where the stains were prominent. Which was a strong majority of the hallway. The first pass really did the job better then great but considering the nature of the stains, I wanted to be more than thorough. This hallway measures about 4' wide by 23' long and took about 1 to 1 1/2 hours. But, boy was it worth the time, money, and effort. The bedroom is my young daughters who struggles still with door knobs and thus her room is open for her, by which the pets in the house took full advantage. Still not good but they did keep most of there spotting to the hall way. Her room was just as, if not more important than the hallway to get cleaned for her benefit and sanitary health.Once I was done with the cleaning process, I emptied the dirty and clean water tanks and rinsed thoroughly. Then I put about 1/2 gallon of plain water (No solution) in the fresh water tank and ran that over the clean floor by spraying the water just as if I were cleaning the floor. I didn't use the full half gallon. I ran enough water through until I felt the solution was pretty well cleaned out. Probably a total of 1-2 minutes of total trigger squeeze. This was to allow fresh water to run through the machine to clear out the solvents in the lines that carry the solution from the clean tank to the sprayer nozzle. I can't confirm this was or was not long enough. Just going on experience to avoid damage of the unit while in storage. Once that was all done. The carpet was completely dry by the time we went to bed. So probably 4 hours or less.It's been 2 days since I did this and spots have NOT magically returned. This is a major win. I will try to update this post after a total 1 week has passed to see if it still holds. If so, I'd call this an absolute winner, where other products have completed the job or professionals have left and within two days spots have returned. That has not yet occurred in this case.Also, to resolve the pet issue, we placed a very solid metal baby gate to block the dogs from going back upstairs without us, during the day, until it's all our bed time. We work from home, so the dogs hang with us throughout the day. They sleep. We work. They have always and continue to go out at least 8 or more times daily or whenever they sit at the door and whine. Love 'em, but now we can live easier without "never disappearing" pet stains. We've been renting in this house for almost a year and in our previous home we sold, we had hard floor, for a reason, and will do the same when we buy again in the next 6 months or less. Clean floor + landlord = No loss.Happy research hunting and good luck with your floors.