Bissell SpotClean™ Review: Does it suck?

Yes, that was a cheeky play on words! The Bissell SpotClean™ has 50% more suction! Now, I didn’t use the previous model, but this one sucks dirty wet stuff up like its nothing! I’ve found three items to test the SpotClean™ on in the last couple of weeks, and we’ll get to that later, firstly – how did we get here? A few weeks back I had the Bissell Powerclean on the workbench, with pleasing results! The team though we might step it up some with a look at the Bissell SpotClean™.

The Bissell SpotClean™ is effectively a compact wet vacuum cleaner with 50% more suction when compared with its predecessor. It comes with three cleaning tools, two different bottles of cleaning formula, the 1.5m length main hose (attached) and its various instruction cards. Bissell supply three brushes, the 4″ self-cleaning tough stain tool, in my use, I find this is my most used tool, wide enough for most spills or floor stains, it has bristles for scrubbing and a built in self-clean mode, too. Simple to use. You also have the 3-in-1 tool, great for tight carpeted corners (stairs, though mine are wooden, so I didn’t get to test stair-theory) I found it very handy if I needed to get in close to the corner of a room, say where my child had tripped and spilled a drink down a wall onto the carpet while simply trying to walk through a door!! (WHO DOES THAT!) Then there is the 6″ straight tool, like the 4″ but a couple inches wider, best for cleaning larger patches. Again, the 4″ was probably my most used and stays attached 90% of the time.

The Bissell SpotClean™ is very simple to use, it has two tanks, one for clean water, one for the dirty water. I used the Bissell SpotClean™ for three tasks for this review – A very dirty dining chair, an array of carpet tasks and then I ventured into the car. I started small, the clean water tank has a “small job” and a “large job” set of markings, the larger job is just under a litre of water and solution. (950ml) with the dirty water tank being able to take 850ml (with an overfill cut-off) The variation is that obviously not 100% of the water you spray out onto your stain area is going to be able to be sucked back up and is left to dry on the thing you’re cleaning. You plug in the power cable (very handy at 4.5m long!) and after choosing your job size, you fill the clean water tank to the water line with warm water, then fill the remaining space to the next line with your chosen cleaning solution.

The two solutions that are provided in the Bissell SpotClean™ kit are Pet stain & Odour Formula (it’s a sample size, but generous at 236 ml) and you also get a 236 ml sample bottle of Oxy Boost, for general formula enhancement, The oxygen in the enhancer creates a reaction with the stain on contact to remove even tough set-in stains. After filling the tank with your water and solution, you flip the cleaning tool into its spray mode, and spray the area of your stain and then leave it sit for around 15 minutes. Go and make yourself a cuppa, don’t spill it!

You’ve waited 15 minutes, now you can flick the Bissell SpotClean™ into suction mode and go to town! I gave the chair I was working on a light bristling scrub, and then worked my way across the chair and was pleasantly (grossed out!) surprised at the amount of goodness knows what being sucked out of the seat cushions! T’was indeed dirty. You can see the “before” below, complete with my supervisor.

I’m not going to pretend like some wizard magic happened, and that after one pass it was miraculously clean, but after one pass it was MUCH cleaner, and I hope after a couple more passes we’ll be where we need to be, but this is an “after the first go with the Bissell SpotClean™ shot – below. I did ask a lot of the small cleaner, I intentionally went out and found the most dirty chair I could! Gotta test it properly!

My second task, well, second and third really, they were both my own stupid fault! I like a cup of tea in the evening, like right now, but I have to walk up stairs to get back to my desk with my nice, full, hot cup of Yorkshire – sometimes I get distracted and, well… We have light coloured carpet upstairs. In certain light you can see the tea (and coffee!) stains that I’ve managed to inflict on the short walk from the top of the stairs over to my desk.

Most of these stains are older, not fresh and easy to get rid of – I thought I’d try my luck and run the Bissell SpotClean™ over them one after another, admittedly, right after I’d done the clean my wife walked upstairs and suggested that I’d made it worse!! The patch about 30cm across was still damp, so the colour wasn’t the same, thus her assumption that I’d royally stuffed up – I hadn’t and the stains are all gone! I did find that after performing a spot clean on carpet, you allow the patch to fully dry and them run over the patch you’ve cleaned with your regular vac (In my case the Bissell PowerClean Dual!) and that levels out all the fibres and everything looks new again. The only caution here is that if your lighter coloured carpet is generally very dirty, you spot clean it and then you need to do the whole lot or at least a wider area to feather it in – be warned, the Bissell does a great job!

Unconventional, but as the air exhaust for the machine is under the main body of the cleaner, I found that if I sat the cleaner on the area I’d cleaned for a few minutes, it really cut down on carpet drying time – I’m pretty sure they don’t suggest this in the product manual! Typically you’d want to wait two to three hours before walking on the carpet you’ve cleaned, but as it’s a spot cleaner and you’re not doing a full room of carpet, you can skirt around the wet bits until they’re dry and you can walk on them again. I also tested the Bissell on some pretty awful (six years of kids and dogs) car floor mats, they cleaned up so well that the rest of the car looks really average – I’ll work on that next weekend!

After you’ve used the SpotClean™, and certainly in the case of my chair clean, the machine really does have a tasty film of residue in the tool and likely inside the main suction hose, too. The machine, tool and hose are actually very easy to clean! You grab yourself a small bowl of water, make sure your dirty water tank on the cleaner is empty, and simply suck the fresh bowl of water through the tool and hose cleaning it out and leaving that dirty residue in the dirty water tank ready to be dispatched down the nearest sink. As I was at the sink while doing this clean, I simply filled the bottom of the sink and then sucked it straight up – easy. If you hold the hose up before you turn the machine off, this will make sure you get most of the water out of the hose ready to store away until the next job.

A small caveat – The SpotClean™ is moderately noisy at 76dB, about as loud as a large bunch of angry crickets on a mild night, or perhaps a gale force wind rushing through trees – not crazy loud, but you wouldn’t want to save some cleaning outside the door of someone that has just nodded off to sleep I guess. The power cable has a dedicated place to neatly wrap into, as does the suction hose. The extra cleaning tools (I leave one attached full-time, although I don’t have it attached in the photo below) don’t attach and I keep them stashed in a cupboard.

I started out my article asking if the Bissell SpotClean™ did indeed suck, and it does – for a small cleaner it sucks great! Very impressed with the cleaning power out of a machine that’s about the same size as my Jack Russell – A worthy addition to any cleaning cupboard for those hard jobs where you have to wheel out the big guns, so to speak! Good job, Bissell.

The Bissell SpotClean has RRP A$269 and is available from their website and authorised resellers.