Pros: Quick, easy, effective
Cons: You need to wipe up the grunge left behind around the edges
Rating: 5 out of 5
First posted 7/8/2002
I recently bought the Eureka Enviro Floor Steamer 300A and the Eureka Hot Shot Steamer 350A in an effort to make house-cleaning easier on our cats. I didn’t want to risk that they’d walk through a missed bit of chemical, lick it off their paws, and get sick. The Hot Shot is absolutely wonderful, but it would be a pain to use it to do floors, so we picked up the floor steamer as well. At first I worried that it was a bit expensive for something that would only clean a few rooms of the house (most of our rooms are carpeted), but I have become quite happy that we purchased it since we started using it!
Easy to Use
It’s quite easy to use the floor steamer. You attach the telescoping handle to the base by screwing it in. You cover the base of the steamer with one of the waffle-weave cloths that are included. Fill the provided cup twice with water, and pour into the steamer using the provided funnel. Cap it, plug it in, turn it on, wait until it starts steaming. Then slowly move it over your floor.
This won’t work on every surface. Self-adhesive vinyl squares, wax-treated floors and un-sealed wood are no-nos. It worked just fine on our vinyl kitchen and bathroom floors. It is recommended that you test the steamer on a corner of your floor before doing the whole thing.
Features
Sanitizing: A steamer can sanitize your floor, killing germs and dust mites, if you take a little extra time and hold it over an area for 8 seconds.
Lack of Chemicals: The steamer uses pure, normal tap water (distilled if your water is particularly hard), no chemicals. It’s thus much safer and easier on your pets, your children, and your sensitive skin.
Dry Floor: Because the steamer puts less water on your floor, the floor dries literally within a minute or two. By the time we’re halfway done with the kitchen, the floor is already dry where we started! No more waiting to go back into a room for a half-hour or more.
Cleaner Floor: On the one hand, the waffle-weave cloth doesn’t actually pick everything up off the floor. We found that we had to take a couple of paper towels and go around the edge of the room picking up the last of the cruft (although it is much easier to pick up when it’s shoved to the edge). On the other hand, unlike a mop, which trails its now-dirty water onto the floor by the time you’re done with a room, the steamer is still clean! No need to decide between replacing the water halfway through or living with a dirty sheen on your floor. Just keep cleaning.
Quick: We easily clean the kitchen with water to spare, so it’s a very quick process. No more rinsing the mop, wringing it out, cleaning out the bucket afterward, and so on. Just let the steamer cool down afterward and dump out any excess water.
Steamers All the Way!
Our house has stayed much cleaner since we bought our steamers. We no longer have to worry about the cats and spend lots of time trying to make sure we’ve rinsed everything thoroughly. Once one of the steamers is going, it’s really easy to not only clean the stove top or kitchen floor we’d planned on, but just keep on going and take care of the counters or the bathroom floor as well.
The process is faster, and it doesn’t irritate the sensitive skin on my fingers. No need to keep small bathrooms well-ventilated to handle chemical fumes. We find it much easier to clean, we get a great deal more cleaned, and everything comes out looking much shinier and nicer than it did when we used chemicals and scrubbed everything – for far less effort.
Sure, you need to use paper towels to wipe up the grunge that the steamers leave behind, and the waffle-weave cloths have to be hand-rinsed and line-dried. But who cares? In every other way our steamers are superior to our previous methods of cleaning. We’ve finally gotten to cleaning projects that have waited since we moved in a year ago. The steamers are well worth every penny we paid for them, and our house looks so much nicer!
Where can I get the 350a enviro steamer. Mine broke and I want another. The best steamer ever.
Hmm, good question. Amazon.com currently lists it as “unavailable”, but I find that their status goes back and forth as various sellers have things for sale, so you might check back there now and then.
I did a bit of a search and couldn’t find that exact model any more (sadly it looks as though it might be out of production). I don’t know if this steamer is any good, but it looks as though it’s designed along a similar premise.
2 Veronica, its available on amazon again.
I need another hot shot and my sister wants one but I can’t seem to find it either
If you’ll check Amazon every couple of weeks or so, you will see that there are some third party companies that are shipping the Enviro steam cleaner. The newest models are even cheaper with Amazon…but if you want to grab one you may pay a few more bucks from one of these other sources.
Veronica, we have a 350a too and we absolutely love it. Two of my kids have really bad allergies so we have to keep everything allergy free as possible and it really does the job.
The lady mentions that she is happy that she isnt using chemicals with the cats but one thing my family likes about using
Steam Mops is that WE dont inhale the chemicals lol, we love the cat too but our health comes first.
Yes, but you are much less likely than your cat to stick your face close to the cleaning fumes and inhale them out of curiosity. At least, I hope so. If not, I’d worry…
I think it has got all the feature that makes it a good product but i think its little expensive.
Unfortunately, this model is not available on Amazon 🙁 Only the 313 A model can be found there. However, that steam cleaner is highly rated and has a four star rating from over 700 consumers!
Sure, the eureka 300 was a good steam mop, but after testing the 313a, I think the 313a wins hands down. I personally own one, but also have 3 others we use with our household cleaning business. I’ve been using it for almost two years and still going strong.
After the first two initializing uses it steams perfect! Also obviously the steam lasts longest if you don’t hold the mop above the floor to walk to another area since the steam pours out as it will with any steam mop if you do.
The Enviro Steamer 313 is a great steam mop, never used the 300 but I can’t fault the newer model for ease of use and speed of set up. Floors left fresh and virtually dry.