One mistake I made when I was a new carpet cleaner owner was not cleaning the machine enough. I had a fairly decent Hoover steam cleaner as my first model, and it had these brushes called “SpinScrub” brushes.
They are pretty neat in that they have a spinning action that does a really nice job of scrubbing the carpets when the machine is at work. I like it a lot better than the way Bissell machines work. Many Bissel machines I have seen just have a big spinning bar with brush bristles, sort of like what most vacuums have.
The Hoover brushes I think do a little better job of scrubbing the carpet from many different angles, breaking loose all sorts of stuff from the fibers. I could be wrong as a don’t have scientific evidence to back this up, but I just get the feeling that these SpinScrub brushes scrub very thoroughly.
Don't let this happen to yours! It's pretty easy to take this apart and clean these brushes up.
Well, anyways, I should get back to my main point. I didn’t do a good job of regularly cleaning my SpinScrub brushes at first, and the first time I did actually try to clean them, after months of use, it was a really big pain in the rear.
I had to use a metal brush to clean most of the junk out of the brushes, and that was something that I only figured out after experimenting with a few different methods of scraping the junk out of the brushes on the steam cleaner.
How I cleaned my SpinScrub brushes
Taking the carpet cleaner apart to access the brushes wasn’t too bad. I was able to take it apart without having to really read any instructions on how to do it. So for that reason I would consider it pretty user-friendly from a maintenance standpoint.
Once I had taken my machine apart enough to get the individual brushes out of the unit, I started running some really hot water in the bath tub. I basically sat on the edge of the tub, running the brushes under hot water, using a metal brush to scrape the junk out of the brushes. It didn’t take too long once I got a groove down and figured out the best approach.
The stuff I scraped out of the brushes was remains of detergent, carpet fibers and other stuff, so it was like trying to get condensed lint or something out of a really tight brush. It wasn’t too hard, but it wasn’t really very easy either. I’d put it in the moderately difficult and frustrating category.
I’d imagine this experience is about the same for any type of carpet cleaner. They all have brushes of some sort that will get dirty from heavy use.
My recommendation for cleaning carpet cleaner brushes
I would recommend that if you have a carpet cleaner that you use regularly, that you clean the brushes on a regular basis. It’s an easy thing to forget. But it’s easier to do if you don’t let it go for too long. I ran into trouble because I put it off for months. But then I learned. So just keep up on this sort of stuff and maintenance will generally be a lot easier. This applies to many things, really.
Comments are closed.