The day that everything became clean (Hoover F2200)

Member Name: surfgurrl

Product:	Hoover F2200
Date:	02/04/03 (249 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: You spend less time cleaning , Less cloths and chemicals, really effective

Disadvantages: danger of being really boring , refilling with water every hour (, the price

I bought this under some apprehension. After all if steam cleaners were really that great wouldn't everyone have one? Well, I think I know the reason why people don't buy them and that's because they prefer to have lots and lots of cleaning products and cloths under the sink!

The first thing I did was to get the creases out of the living room curtains - they are a thick tapestry fabric and fully lined and I had better things to do than get them down to iron them after having hung them for the first time after mum delivered them (thanks for making them mum!). I was pretty impressed as the creases just came straight out.

The next bug bear to be attacked was the glass doors to the showers. Boy oh boy I couldn't believe just how easy it was with the glass attachment - it just cut through all the shampoo and soap splashes. I then got the nozzle out and blasted the runoff channel at the bottom of the door. It was quite horrific really as I thought it was meant to be grey.. it's not any more.

I then attacked the mirror doors in our bedroom - now these are floor to ceiling but I managed to do the lot by using the extender poles. All my handprints left by us ( but mainly by my 2 year old son) were gone.

What could a girl do next? The windows of course - and I didn't even have to change tools! It's pretty freaky steaming the windows up and you get more practised with the squeegee as you go along but all that you have at the end of your session is some mucky liquid at the bottom of the window which you can get shot of with a cloth. Now the kitchen window is something else - but I managed to sort it out - it's not been this clean before ( We only moved in a year ago).

What else - well it's just fantastic with anything greasy - we have a fryer which is a glorified glass bowl - it looks great in the lakeland catalog and on the shop shelves but it can give you great big plasticised

grease splashes on your surfaces - nothing had shifted this before - but it came right off. The doors to the kitchen cupboards cleaned up a treat and so quickly - let alone to gunk from the ones near the extractor fan.

The other thing I've used this for is steam cleaning clothes - it's actually the main reason I got it as I hate ironing and this doesn't go that well with running an internet clothes agency does it?!! It's just amazing at this and other people have brought their linen and suits round to the house to get them sorted since I bought this.

Apparently this is made by Polti - Polti spares certainly fit (the glass cleaner attachment was bought separately). I bought mine from ebay and got a great product at far less than Polti prices.

There's a refill indicator and a pressure gauge so you know just what is going on at anytime.. it seems to perform best after it's been used for a while- there's no need to stop when you run out of water as you can fill the tank when it's in operation without affecting the pressure.

When you first start it up run some of the steam into a sink or a jug to get rid of the water that has condensed in the hose first so that things take less time to dry

update april '03 - I've found a really great new use!! I steamed out the hose for my platypus hydration bottle - It got some sort of gunkytype algae stuff from where it was in the sun winding around from my back to my mouth!! I'd tried everything before and managed to kill it off but it still looked gross and I didn't feel like buying a new tube at £10... Anyway I steamed it - it got flexible and I rolled it about on itself and lo and behold the gunk came right off!!!
I've told the hub that he shoudl try using it for his home brew equipment!!

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