Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Just got this and very pleased at its ability to clean my car's carpets and cloth upholstery using the "free" bottle of Bissell formula that came with it. The car is 22 years old and to my knowledge never detailed before. The cleaner is bigger and heavier than I thought... should have paid more attention to the physical specs in the listing. Good for biceps and triceps, anyway. It's pretty loud. The shipping carton is more than adequate even for Amazon logistics. And it's nice that all the internal packing material is recyclable. It soon became clear that we'll be needing less than a full tank of cleaning solution when we tackle small jobs, so here are the volumes I found: Volume of liquid to the "Formula" line: 3/8 Cup or 100 ml of Bissell formula Required to the fill the tank to the full line after adding formula: 5 1/4 Cup or ~2300 ml of water Some cleaning hints: I had to use more of the mixed cleaning solution + water than I thought, so keep the trigger pulled and the spray flowing. The suction (brand new out of the box) is good enough to remove a goodly amount of the solution you've put down. Except for one stubbornly-stained carpet area, all the seats and carpets in our car were dry in a couple of hours - this on a 90 deg. F day with full sunshine. By the way, when you're done, don't skip using the blunt-ended power clean attachment. There was a lot of crud that got washed out of the flexible tubing and into the catch tank when I was done. The catch tank itself is fairly easy to clean with a couple of fills and rinses with water. Cleaning the brush head... people are right: there's no way to get all of the junk out, at least not with flow restrictors on your household faucets. Hypothesis regarding the negative "no suction / leaks" reviews A significant number of negative reviews mention inadequate suction and fluid leakage from the bottom of the unit. Many of them go on to say that this is after storing the unit away for a while. It's pretty clear that the level of suction depends on the seals on the collection container. My hypothesis is that people have stored it away with the latch at the top of the collection container snapped down... and that the triangular foam gasket at the top gets compressed and the black rubber seal at the bottom likewise gets compressed. Enough deformation and air will be sucked in through them, meaning that the suction at the cleaning head will be compromised. The black gasket at the bottom is less than $3 from the parts section of the Bissell web site, so I bought a replacement that will be squirreled away for use when the time comes. (I've learned to buy obvious wear items at the time I buy things, since models and their parts are quickly gone a few years down the road.) And, if the triangular foam gasket at the top starts leaking air, I'll just glue in a triangle of the thin sheet craft foam from Michael's or equivalent craft/art store. The leakage and the vacuum problem might be more complicated than this, but I'm going to wait until the warranty expires before disassembling the unit to take a look at any internal sealing that might prove to be problematic with the passage of time. For now, I couldn't be happier.