Bissell SpotClean Turbo 3911F

This is a very handy unit for doing spot cleaning. Having said that, I didn't care what it did so long as it was able to clean cat urine from the plush carpet. Our old cat got stressed after a house move and decided that using one of the bedrooms for urinating was the thing to do. Now this smell to some people will "outlast religion" in the… Read more

words of Kenny. It does that to me and is intolerable. Cats will keep going back to the same spot as well so it was a problem that just wouldn't go away. I had used carpet cleaner on it and a new and innovative Australian cat/dog urine removal spray set but all to no avail. I will point out that I have a high sensitivity to this compared to others so me not smelling it isn't the same as asking other people if they don't. The only thing I had not tried was a motorised carpet cleaner I could use at home.

I spent a long time looking for the right unit, right features, right ecosystem of chemistry, best reviews AND being able to get it at the right price before deciding on this unit. Bissell has a strong history of good hardware for cleaning and I also have a Bissell steam clean unit (hand held) which is great so I was comfortable it met the brief for pet odor relief and cleaning.

The unit is light, carries a fair bit of water and can collect that water quite effectively from the carpet (so long as you do this right which I didn't initially). Hold the nozzle with full spray on, soak the carpet whilst moving in lines, sucking it up and then go over it without soaking it, just sucking up the water. Needs a bit of time to take as much water as possible. The unit comes with quite a few heads for different applications i.e. carpet (deep vs shallow), upholstery on furniture, curtains etc. My fixed mission was to use the deep carpet cleaning head only.

I've now been over the spot 5 or 6 times (rather than once or twice as the marketing would suggest) to get this smell out. I have used the Bissell (ONLY) carpet chemicals for pet odors as well as the pre-treatment spray which you put on for 24 hours to use enzymes to break down the urine chemistry. For most people this seemed to work, they can no longer smell the odor at all. But only after the 5th session did I get that same result. So in this way it works for most people. However, if you rub your hand on the carpet where the problem occurred, it still stinks. This may be acceptable to some, but i'm disappointed in the effort it took to get that far. Hence the 3 stars for this application. It just doesn't seem like the carpet will literally be clean of the smell.

I had a section of carpet maybe 1 metre long by 30 cm deep to clean (multiple spots same area). So I took my time. The resulting water sucked up was literally urine coloured, so you can tell it's getting to work well, but I have to wonder what was missing to not fix it completely.

Great unit though. Not really loud, lots of suction, easy to put water into and take the water off from. Easy to clean, good accessories. Hose is quite short curiously enough. I suspect that may be due to keeping maximum suction going at a short distance or something, but no science behind my observation.

So overall, poor result given what I was trying to achieve. Carpet looks very clean but rubbing it shows it still has something in/on it. It could be awesome for other work on shallower targets i.e. furniture, curtains, mats but I didn't get it for that.