by Matt Berg
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It’s a shame that my carpets are never as clean when I live in a rental house or apartment as they are when I move out. It’s probably because using a Rug Doctor on the carpeting is a real chore, and done best when there is no furniture in the room. The Rug Doctor may resemble a vacuum cleaner, but it’s a completely different machine.
First, the Rug Doctor is sort of heavy. If my grandmother told me she plans to use a Rug Doctor, I would volunteer to help her. In addition to its weight, the
Rug Doctor is also sort of cumbersome and bulky, so to take it home from the grocery store, I had to fold the seats down and put it in the back seat, since it wouldn’t fit through the trunk opening of my car. Plus, since Rug Doctors are usually rentals, they get heavy usage and it shows… and some people are better about cleaning up after themselves than others. Supposedly there is a $10 cleaning fee if a machine is returned dirty, but that all comes down to the work ethic of the person to which the machine was returned…
After I got the Rug Doctor home, it was time to use it. As unwieldy as it was to get in my car and drive home, the Rug Doctor is at least equally unwieldy around the house. It’s very easy to make a mess filling up or emptying the Rug Doctor, and care must be exercised. Removing the dirty water tank requires sliding a metal bar off the top of it, which carries
a possibility of pinched or jammed fingers. Then, the dirty water tank doesn’t just slide out as simply as it should; I had to grasp both sides of it and sort of work it out each time. This became especially nerve-wracking when the dirty water tank was full. The dirty water tank needs to be removed each time the Rug Doctor needs to be filled with hot water/cleaner solution.
To fill the Rug Doctor, the hot water and cleaner need to be mixed in a bucket and poured into a small opening on the front of the unit. There is little headroom above the hot water/cleaner tank, so if you use a big bucket like I did, you may spill the solution all over the machine and your carpet. One fill up of the Rug Doctor tank allowed me to steam clean about one regular-sized bedroom. Also, there were a couple times I ran out of cleaner and didn’t realize it, because my mind wandered. There is no indicator, aside from the ...
