Have any experience with those household steamer cleaners?

In My Humble Opinion
1

There’s an infomercial for this thing: http://www.4essays.com/shopping/housewares/scunci.htm

It would really only want it for cleaning glass shower doors.
My niece does houscleaning jobs to earn money, and if it works well for that job, which she complains about, I would get it for her.

The ad goes on and on about soap scum, but I wonder if it works on hard water spots as well, etc.

2

This thread is better suited for In My Humble Opinion. I’ll move it for you.

Cajun Man
for the SDMB

3

You might want to check out this thread.

StG

4

That other thread didn’t help. Maybe someone here today has one of these?

Or can you suggest other places to ask (I looked at epinions.com but couldn’t figure out what the category was- kept getting rice steamers)

5

There’s a revue site here www.tv-product-reviews.com

6

I don’t know about this particular product, but if it’s anything like those carpet steam cleaners… Don’t waste your money.

7

I saw the last thred and didn’t respond so I feel guilty. So here goes…

I do have steam cleaner. I got it about five years ago when all those “steam buggy” ads wre on the TV. I did some research and found a version of a steam cleaner that was highly ranked and not too expensive. ($200) From everything I found, the cheap (<$100) cleaners seem to be poorly ranked. There are some very high end steam cleaners (around $1000) that are consistently ranked highly and sold through allergy sites. The cleaner appealed to me because you could suppossedly eliminate the need for toxic cleaning agents.

OK, as for the cleaning itself: it’s really good for soap scum as the steam softens it. It’s good for corners and crevics that you can really blast out. It doesn’t miraculously clear off all the black stuff like the comercials show. It’s nice to know you’re not using toxic chmicals and are sterilizing stuff anyway. But, cleaning with steam is really hot. I always had sweat dripping down my face when I used it and that’s a reason I’m reluctant to drag it out.

Here’s a link to an eopinions review of the model I bought. (note that eopinions has it classfied under “vacuum cleaners” but most steam cleaners, other than the carpet ones, don’t have any suction, they just shoot steam) I basically agree with everything the reviwer says. She also mentions it does poorly on hard water stains, the OP’s concern.

Overall opinion: I wouldn’t buy it again. I rarely us mine do to the heat (I also don’t use air conditioning much, it’d be easier to use in an air conditiond house). In fact, I keep thinking I should unload it on Ebay sometime. I dunno, tho’, in your situation, with a lot of soap scummy shower doors to clean, it might be useful. Hope any of this helps…

8

I don’t have a steam cleaner but my sister has one. What she has found is that steam doesn’t clean things it just gets them really really hot and wet. If she softens some kind of gunk with the steam she still needs to use a cleaner to get all the gunk residue off the surface. She thinks a steam cleaner is good for things too dirty to make a dent in with a cleaner , but once it’s just a normal amount of dirty it’s not worth the bother to use the steam cleaner.

Have you tried foaming bathroom cleaner on the shower doors? Even the stuff from the dollar stores is like a miracle cleaner on them.