Hoover Max Extract Dual V WidePath Carpet Washer, F7411900

I bought this model to replace a Bissel carpet cleaner that I'd used for many years. I own a daycare, so having a good carpet cleaner is an absolute necessity, and this model is used on a weekly basis. This cleaner works very well -- I'm a big fan of the horizontally rotating brush heads, as opposed to the roller type. For some reason, this seems to clean better.After about 3 months of use, the plastic attachment points on the dirty water tank broke off where the handle attaches to the tank. As mentioned by other reviewers, this seems to be a design flaw. As a former mechanical engineer who designed plastic parts, it's easy to see that the handle attachment points are not as sturdy as they should be. I can still use the cleaner, but the lid just sits on top of the tank and is not secured.Luckily, (so I thought) I'd purchased a warranty through Squaretrade just in case something like this happened. After contacting Squaretrade, they pointed me towards Hoover, since it's still under the 1 year manufacturer warranty. However, I just got off the phone with Hoover, and plastic molded parts are apparently not covered under the warranty, which only covers manufacturer defects. Obviously, "manufacturing defects" is very vague, and in my opinion a poorly designed part is definitely a manufacturing defect. They offered to replace the tank as a one-time "courtesy" to me at no charge, but I have a feeling in a few months, I'll be looking for a replacement again. My only hope is that Squaretrade's extended warranty will live up to the hype, otherwise I'll need to purchase new tanks on a regular basis.So, if you're looking for a carpet cleaner that only gets used every few months, and you're going to handle it very gingerly, this one works great. If you need more durability that that, I would look elsewhere.

I just purchased this from Amazon and chose the standard ground shipping. Much to my surprise, the next day, I received a shipment email stating that it was shipped via FedEx and would be at my house the following day. I thought - well, it may be coming FedEx, but probably ground and it would be a couple of days - but even so, that would be great as I wasn't expecting it to even ship for another 5 days or so. Well as stated in the confirmation email, the next day I came home and found it on the front door step. I couldn't be happier about the shipping.I had been thinking about purchasing a steamvac and had done a little bit of research, but not a lot until two weeks ago. Sometimes men get these "wonderful" ideas. Well my man's wonderful idea was to put the bag of grapefruit in our closet since it was dark, cool and would prevent it from molding before he could eat it. Well I'm sure you know how this "idea" is going to end - badly. That bag of grapefruit got "buried" underneath some things and of course it rotted. For some strange reason, it didn't smell - but when it was discovered (weeks later), my tan carpet had a huge yellow, green, icky, moldy, wet spot on it. Luckily I was headed out the door so he had to deal with the initial clean up. But now it was imperative to get a cleaner and get it quickly (and books on organizing are obviously next). So I stepped up the research. My research showed that Hoover seemed to have great reviews and this site ([...]) said that the 5914-900 was the best cleaner, but that this one - the 7411-900 was also in the top. So I did some more comparison and kept leaning towards the 7411 - but thought I shouldn't stray away from the 5914. Well I went to the Hoover site and downloaded both manuals and reviewed them side by side to really see the differences. I quickly found out that to use the hand tools on the 5914 you had to pretty much disassemble the cleaner, whereas, with the 7411, you just attached it to the top. It became a no-brainer for me at that point and I purchased the F7411-900.Just before I used it, I thought, maybe I should take a picture of the stain and I thought no - there's no reason to. This stain is so bad, I'll just be happy if I get the mold up and stop the damage and was thankful that it wasn't in the "visible" part of the house. This stain looked like 50 dogs had urinated over and over in the same spot for a long period of time. I purchased the Hoover 40321130 Premium Pet Formula Carpet/Upholstery Detergent, 128-Ounce bottle but it turned out they didn't have it and canceled the order, so I ended up using the sample bottle that comes with the cleaner which I think is the deep cleansing if I remember correctly.We turned on the cleaner and pushed it forward while pressing the button to release the soap and then pulled it back, still pressing the button to release the soap (as it said to do initially). As we pulled it back, it was sucking up what it had already put down and you could see the yellow come through the clear front. As we pulled it back and "exposed" the spot, I was shocked, it was much, much cleaner and almost gone. So we did a rinse cycle and dry cycle and then did the cleaning cycle again. The book says don't do more than 4 times in one area. If it takes more than that - let it dry and come back and do it again. But we didn't need to do it more than 4 times - it worked WONDERFULLY!! I really could not believe it, nor could he. We just knew the carpet was ruined in that one area. I have had Bissell cleaners in the past and they worked OK - but nothing like this. Granted it's been years since I had one and technology has changed - but still I can't imagine Chem-Dry doing any better. And it really does pull a lot of the water out of the carpet - the spot dried in no time.I haven't used it on the rest of the carpet yet, but will this weekend. Although we just got it, I am very satisfied with it. I'm just kicking myself for not taking a before picture so that I could post a before and after - you just would not believe it.For the price, I don't see how you can go wrong - you can't even get a professional to come clean 3 rooms for the price of this cleaner.