19 out of 19 people found this review helpful.
Mediocre wet or dry.
Date of Review: Jun 1, 2006
The Bottom Line: Pass on this until a rotating brush or some better way to scrub and lift ground-in dirt is added.
The Bissell 5200 "Flip-It Bare Floor Cleaner" vacuum, an attempt to produce an electric broom-style wet cleaner for hard floors is, for the most part, a failure.
Simply put, this vacuum doesn't get floors clean. Certainly, it spits out a lot of soapy water, and sucks most of it back up fairly dependably--although not so much that I'd use it on a wood floor--but the only scrubbing being done is by a stationary nylon brush on the bottom, which does very little to loosen ground-in dirt or sticky messes like spilled pop, or by a machine-washable mop insert, to which one can't apply enough pressure to scrub or loosen dirt. One of my labmates purchased one to tidy up our always-grungy lineoleum floors; while the clean spots look cleaner after a pass with the Bissell Flip-It, the dirty spots aren't any less dirty. Sponge mops completely outclass it.
That's a shame; the Flip-It has the potential to take a lot of the work out of floor cleaning. There's no need to fill and haul a bucket of soapy water, or to constantly wring, or even to rinse. One simply fills a (perhaps overly small) reservoir with water and Bissell's proprietary cleaner, plugs it in , and uses it like a vacuum cleaner, squeezing a trigger to release cleaner on the forward stroke and sucking it up in the backward stroke. A second reservoir must be emptied when done.
The whole thing comes virtually pre-assembled out of the box. The only assembly required of the end-user is to snap the reservoirs in place and to slip the brush or mop in, neither of which are very difficult or even require directions. The power cord at 22 feet in length is long enough for most household applications.
At a little over ten pounds when dry, the Bissell Flip-It is at least twice as heavy as most electric sweepers on the market these days, including cordless models. Turned around, it can be used for this function, but it doesn't do very well at this either. It's much clumsier than an electric sweeper, without wheels but too heavy to not have them, and its suction is a bit on the weak side.
The Bissell Flip-It is better than an ordinary electric sweeper or bucket and mop in one case only: it's a convenient way to clean liquids off of floors. But there's no sense in dropping $100 over spilt milk!
