Do you remember what colour your carpets were when you bought them? (Rug Doctor Mighty Pro)

Member Name: dmandrew

Product:	Rug Doctor Mighty Pro
Date:	22/07/08 (6296 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Really works well

Disadvantages: Quite heavy to use, and not that cheap

Forget the competition. This is one beautiful machine that does what it says it will. It comes with quite a bit of hype and bragging, but when you get it going you can see why.

It's a carpet cleaner. So that's exactly what it does: it makes your carpet clean. Not just superficially, but deep down clean, and prettily textured as well.

We have three cats, and as any cat owner will know, cats are naturally clean animals. However, they are also creatures of habit, as well as good hunters, so there can be all sorts of stuff to clear up. I'm sure you don't need too much detail - let's just say that it's all biological.

I've tried all of those squirty things that cost four quid a bottle, made by a variety of manufacturers. Some work quite well, but there are some cat stains that simply don't come out. If you have light coloured carpets, that is a disaster. (We live in rented accommodation for half of the year so didn't choose the carpets).

In desperation, I went to B & Q to hire Rug Doctor. It's a pretty substantial vacuum machine, quite heavy to load into the car. Somehow, that's reassuring, especially as you pay 20 quid to hire Rug Doctor for 24 hours. You also have to invest quite a bit on their special cleaning fluid, but if you are using Rug Doctor, that's part of the deal - you can't fill it with anything else. I bought two litres, which is quoted as being enough for a 2 bedroom house. That cost 9 quid, but there was plenty - I used about two thirds for five rooms and a staircase.

You mix the cleaning fluid with hot or warm water (lukewarm if your carpets are wool) using 150 ml of fluid to 9 litres of water. This is poured carefully into a reservoir at the base of Rug Doctor. Above this, there is another tank, which collects the cleaning mixture once it has been through your carpet. You have to refill about every 7 or 8 minutes.

Using the Rug Doctor is easy. First of all, you remove as much furniture as possible, so that you can work without interruption. This can give you storage problems for a while, depending on the layout of your house. You then vacuum the carpets normally with your Hoover, to prevent getting a mess when you use the Rug Doctor. When you turn Rug Doctor on, there is a satisfying vibrating feeling. What is happening is that a strong brush is agitating the carpet underneath, and the machine is sucking up anything that it can. You squeeze a handle to inject the cleaning mixture - this gets sprayed into the carpet. Slowly, you pull the machine back towards you. It only works going backwards, so at the end of each run you wheel it back to the next starting point. This is easy.

When you have covered all the ground you can reach with the machine, you then attach the hand operated cleaning tool. The plumbing for this is very straightforward. This device is useful for room edges, or under low shelves, in corners, and on the stairs. It doesn't come with the vibrating brush, but it still works well.

The amazing thing about Rug Doctor is that it works brilliantly well. You will not believe the improvement that it makes to your carpets. Cat stains that we feared were permanent have simply vanished. Just the first pass of the machine astonished me, and I was ready to be cynical about it.

A lot of water is used in the process. For a normal sized living room, it took three loads of cleaning mixture, i.e. 27 litres. Rug Doctor claim that 80% of liquid gets taken up into the top tank, and I think that that's probably a conservative estimate. If you can leave your windows open, the carpets will be dry in 24 hours. And they look like new!

Rug Doctor are realistic. They do tell you that some stains are impossible to remove, and this was true in my case of some dye that had leached out of a rug on to the carpet below after a little feline accident. But the biological stuff has disappeared - kapow!

Should you buy one or rent one? 20 quid to rent for 24 hours, and our 2-bedroom house took four hours to clean. Often, it will only cost you another fiver to add on another 24 hours, so you could share the costs with a friend or two To buy a Rug Doctor costs around 400 smackers, so you would need to be having messy carpets on regular basis for that to be worthwhile. But if you have a huge house, or lots of houses, then it could be worth it. Rental machines come with a built-in guarantee of working properly.

I hired from B and Q. You need two forms of identity. I didn't know this when first turning up to hire, which was a bit annoying as they would not let me have a machine One is to prove your address, so a recent utility bill will do. The other needs to be something like a passport or driving licence. It seems a bit heavy, but is a measure of how good the machines are - people want to nick them! By the way, the rental ones are red, and the bought ones are blue, so don't buy a red one if you are an honest person!! (PS, there are some old red ones that are non-hire, but if you see one for sale, check it out with Rug Doctor first of all).

B & Q also wanted a 50 quid deposit, and say that you won't get it back unless you clean the machine properly. That's fair enough, and it takes about seven minutes to do this. After all, you don't want to pick up a machine that has someone else's dirt in it.

Around the country, there are apparently about 2000 outlets where you can hire Rug Doctor. If you go to www.rugdoctor.co.uk there is a store locator. The website also contains plenty of information, including some powerful testimonials.

Rug Doctor also sell some little bottles of cleaner, including one that is specifically for Pet Stains. Of course, our cats have behaved perfectly since I cleaned our carpets, so I have not been able to test this yet, but I bet it works.

It was quite hard work to use the Rug Doctor, but immensely satisfying. Instructions for use were clear and easy to understand. This is a quality product that really does the job. I can't wait for when my wife sees the results!

Summary: Good value, nevertheless, and restores your carpets when all else has failed

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