Bissell SpotBot is an Effective Helper, but...

Executive Summary

Update: I have had the SpotBot for several months, and it is one of the few products I've bought that I have absolutely no regrets about buying. It works, over and over again, very well. I mostly use it for cleaning up pet messes.

The rest of this review I wrote after only owning it a week.

Performance: The SpotBot cleans up pet puke pretty well, but not in one shot. I tried to clean up an old deep pepper jam stain in my couch in manual mode, but failed. I got out the jam stain (impressive), but left a huge water mark where the chemicals were applied (bummer). To be fair though, I didn't use all of the appropriate available chemicals that are most suitable for the task.

Maintenance: The SpotBot requires cleaning and maintenance after each use, making it somewhat more laborious than sitting it down and pressing a button.

Ongoing expenses: It uses 4 oz's of fluids (minimum) per auto deep clean. If you're picking up wine or other deep down organic spills, add an incremental 8 oz's of other types of chemicals. Because it only holds one resevoir of fluids at a time, you may have to pour out a perfectly good mixture of the stuff to move from one spill to another. (although in reality it's unlikely that you will have two different spills on the same day, right?)

Ease of Use: For the auto mode, you need three steps:
(1) Fill the resevoir with warm water and appropriate chemicals.
(2) Place the unit over the stain and turn it on.
(3) When done, dump out the dirty water and chemicals and rinse out the resevoirs (not a time consuming task).

For the manual mode, you need six steps, and in my opinion, pretty much negates the whole laziness part of the equation:
(1) Fill the resevoir with warm water and appropriate chemicals.
(2) Detach the manual brush from the back of the unit. Detach the manual hose from the unit, and put the brush on it.
(3) Spray the area with chemicals (easy as pie using a trigger on the hose), and then spend a few minutes sucking up the dirty chemicals from the stained area.
(4) Fill up a bowl with clean water and suck it up to clean out the hose area.
(5) Run the brush under a faucet to clean it.
(6) Dump out the dirt chemicals and rinse out the dirt resevoir.

Other stuff: This baby is noisy. More so than my PowerGlide vacuum cleaner, and much more so than my old trusty little Robo vacuum. Bring on the ear plugs, well, not really *that* noisy. Operation is pretty easy, and the simple and small manual reflects that. Buttons and attachments appear to be of good quality and are intuitive (for me).

The whole shibang

Right, so the question remains: what exactly prompts someone to shell out $150 for a cleaning aid, that you'll probably ony use a couple of times per year? And one that for several of those uses, you could have substituted a roll of paper towels and some Resolve?

For me, it was laziness. So, my experience and this review reflects how effective SpotBot was at making cleanups more convenient. I know from experience that there is very little that can't be cleaned by either: Nature's Miracle for organic spills, or professional cleaning for mold and and grease.

The Purpose

I came home for a week away to see that my pet had puked all over my carpet. Literally in about 7 spots. I took out my handy dandy Nature's Miracle (a freakin' awesome product, been using it for years) and a roll of paper towels. An hour of scrubbing and vacuming later got 95% of the stains out, but there was still some residue. Now I'm pretty confident that another hour wouldda gotten it all out visually, but there's only so much scrubbing I really want to do.

An hour in Sears, a $160 later (I bought the machine and three bottles of extra cleaning fluids including one labelled specifically for pet stains), I had myself one brand spanking new SpotBot.

Puke Cleaning

The Automode has two settings: 3 minutes for new stains, 6 minutes for deep stains. The machine has two resevoirs, one for the cleaning mixture, and the other for dirty water stuff. So I put in, as instructed, about a litre of water (complete guess) and 8 oz's of Little Green cleaning agent (the entire trial bottle). 6 minutes later, I had used over a 1/3 of the cleaning mixture, and while some of my carpet looked clean, some previously clean parts in the circle of magic now looked dirty. Not comforting. 6 minutes after that, so a total of 12 minutes of SpotBot magic, and the previously dirty spot looked mostly clean, very wet, and very circular with a big ring in the carpet. The next day, I'd say 99% of the stain is gone. To be fair, I used didn't use the cleaning fluid that labelled specifically for pet stains, even though I bought the stuff. (I was curious what the default cleaning agent could handle) I couldn still see the outline, but no one visiting my house would. Pretty good, but is it $160 good? Hmmm.

With a little bit of the cleaning solution left in the machine, I didn't bother cleaning out that resevoir. I did dump out the dirty stuff and clean out the second resevoir, which is removable and easy to do.

Jam Cleaning

I also had a 2" square pepper jam stain on my couch that's about a year old. Using the manual mode, which involves the six steps described above, I tried getting the stain out. I think the machine was successful, but now I have this huge darker watermark spot in the couch which will need some attention. Because of the watermark, I'm not 100% positive that I removed the jam stain. I think so, not entirely sure. My plan is to fill the cleaning resevoir with just water and spray the water in the area and use the manual brush to suck it up and hopefully life will be jolly again. But, back to the whole $160 price tag thing, we're now out of the "great value" la la land (yes, la la land is a word or expression or something) that I was hoping to be in.

Chemical Pricing

The financials. Let's say the unit works for 10 years, and I use it 10 times per year. Probably some fair assumptions. 100 uses in total...

Unit cost: $140 including tax
Trial solutions: good for your first two to three cleanings.
Little Green solution used for easy/normal stains: $10 for 64 oz's, which is probably good for about 20 uses. Must be used in addition to the Oxy solution below for certain stains. You'll need five bottles for your lifetime use, or $50 tax.
Oxy solution, required for red wine or hard stains: $10 for 32 oz's, and good for 2 uses. Let's say that 20 of your 100 lifetime uses require this stuff, that's 10 bottles or $100 tax.
Pet solution, suggested for those accidents, and substitute instead of Little Green: $10 for 64 oz's and probably good for 20 uses.

So, $140 for the unit, $150 for the solutions, we'll round to $300 for your 100 uses, or $3 each. Would I rather pay $3 than scrub puke for an hour... you betchya.

Deal or Dud

Will I return the little green guy? Probably not. Did it live up to my expectations? Definitely not. I'm keeping it because it does clean, and I assume that my pets will keep puking and red wine or some other crap will end up on the floor at some time, and the machine is easier than scrubbing with Natures Miracle (which has gotten red wine out of the carpet in the past too! great stuff). It ain't no sliced bread though, but I don't eat that much bread, so it probably don't matter much.