Bissell Proheat Steam Cleaner

 July 2012 Update: Bissell has retooled their Proheat steam cleaner, and it is much better, we will provide a new review shortly.


We bought the Bissell Proheat Steam Cleaner from Costco about 2 years ago.

The first one we bought lasted one cleaning and then the motor burned out. Ok, we figured that it was a fluke, got a bad unit, so we returned it and got a replacement for it. This one seemed to work much better than the first one, but then after about 5 uses, the unit stopped sucking up water and wouldn't dispense the fluid.

We checked out the user manual and found that if it did this, then there was a chance that one of the belts had broken or slipped loose. We followed the easy instructions on how to remove the side panel and sure enough, one of the belts had slipped off... due to all of the fur that had collected on the internal parts.

We own three huskies, so there's a lot of fur in our house, but we also have a Dyson vacuum cleaner (highly recommended) and vacuum before we steam clean. Regardless, the act of spraying fluid on carpet has a way of releasing that deep down husky fur, so we'd get big clumps of wet husky fur whenever we steam cleaned.

After removing as much fur clumps as possible and reseating the belt, the Proheat worked fine, but we soon discovered that after the second or third time we used it, we'd have to take it apart and remove fur and reseat the belt, which got to be very annoying.

The Proheat lasted about two years until today when the fur became its total undoing. I had just started steam cleaning and it make its usual strange noise that signaled that the belt had come off. I took it apart, only to find that husky fur had wrapped so tightly around the brush attachment that it had actually snapped the bolt in half, rendering the Proheat totally useless.

R.I.P. Proheat

For a steam cleaner that we paid about $250 for, we figured it would last longer than two years and wouldn't require us to take it apart every 2-3 uses to reseat the belts on it.

Some of the other aggravations with it included the fact that sometimes it would pick up water very well, other times not so much, so it would take a while for the carpet to dry. We did like the separate container for fluid, clean water and dirty water. It was a pain to thoroughly clean the clean/dirty water container, and dumping the dirty water was precarious at best. We never used the upholstery attachments, so I can't tell you how well that worked, nor did we use the hard floor tool that came with it (we lost that soon after we got it because it came with a bunch of attachments, but no place to store them on the machine... another annoyance).

I give it: