Beats the professional companies hands down! If you’ve ever had, or like to have your carpets “professionally cleaned” than this is the machine for you. If you’ve ever had your carpets done by a professional company, then I recommend you take a rug doctor right after they leave and run it with nothing but just hot water in it. You will not believe the amount of SOAP (and dirt) those professional companies leave behind. The soap itself is a dirt magnet. Clean your carpets yourself with this machine a few times and it will pay for itself AND your carpets will be much cleaner than how the professional companies leave it.My husband and I have five indoor pets (a lab, a sheltie, 3 cats – who seem to constantly be puking hairballs on the carpet) and an 8 month old daughter, who also likes to puke pureed carrots on the carpet when we least expect it! Can I mention the occasional leaky poopy diaper?This rug doctor gets all of the nasty cat vomit, baby BM’s and rainbow baby food (carrots, squash, sweet potatoes, blueberries) out of our lightly colored beige carpet. We have used this for dog vomit and dog diarrhea as well with no stains left behind.My sister’s dog stayed with us once and peed on the carpet in the master bathroom. We used the rug doctor to clean it up. If you don’t get the smell out, once one animal pees in the house, they will all start doing it to mark territory! We cleaned the spot with the rug doctor until the water ran clear and I couldn’t smell anything in the carpet. When we replaced the carpet with tile and pulled the old carpet up, I looked for the pee stain. You could see a very, very faint brown outline of an irregular shape where the rug doctor solution had spread the urine out while cleaning the carpet. Curiosity got the better of me and I wondered if you could smell the pee UNDER the carpet, so I gave it a whiff. I couldn’t detect an odor (my nose is pretty sensitive).We use this machine to clean the carpets in our home every six months. We vacuum (with a Dyson DC17) on a regular basis but still the water we pull out of the carpet is an opaque brown (I should probably clean my carpets more than every six months with five pets and a kid, but I don’t make the time to do so).Another user mentioned using a slower pace with the machine than what the manufacturer recommends. We also do this. It seems you have to go pretty slow for it to do a really thorough job. Yes, it takes time, but when your carpets are as clean as they will ever be without being brand new, it’s worth it!Some tips that have worked well for us:-You don’t need nearly as much soap as they recommend. We use 1/2 or 1/3 of the recommended amount mixed with hot water and it does a great job (will save money on soap too!)-We usually go back over the carpets a second and sometimes third time with just plain hot water to get out any residual soap (yes, even with the reduced amount) until the water we pull out of the carpet is clear (or nearly so). THEN I feel like the carpets are really clean.-When cleaning up pet urine (if this is an issue for you): Use a flourescent black light (you can purchase one from a party store). This will make urine (and some other stains) glow in the dark. This way, you know EXACTLY where it is. After cleaning, you can check with the black light to see if you got all of the urine up or if you need to go over it again a few more times. The room needs to be completely dark (do at night) for the stain to show under the black light.The rug doctor makes your house smell nice and fresh.We just use the plain solution. The rug doctor came with some “special” samples like pet stain remover, odor remover, etc… Which I will probably use if and when our first bottle of solution runs out. We have found that the original formula works just fine for all of our messes.CONS:Only one con that we are aware of: If you are spot cleaning and you mix up too much solution, you want to empty it out of the rug doctor so it doesn’t sit in there for months (mildew?). This is a royal pain. You either have to use all of the solution in your carpet (until it’s empty) or wrestle the rug doctor over a sink or bath tub and turn it upside down. This thing is heavy and somewhat cumbersome (especially if it’s full of water!). Even after dumping it upside down, there will still be a little bit of solution in it. It takes both me and my husband to empty it. One of us holds it on the edge of the bathtub while the other person pushes the button on the rug doctor to blow out all of the remaining solution in the bathtub. The person not balancing the rug doctor on the edge of the tub has to watch to see if the rug doctor is indeed done spouting out the residual solution. Yes, it’s a bit of a pain, but still very worth it. (UPDATE 2/13/11 – THANKS TO ALL OF THE COMMENTATORS WE LEARNED YOU CAN HOLD THE…

Landlord’s Dream – Pull it across your carpet This machine does an adaquate job scrubbing the carpet. My carpet is clean now; however, there are a few tar spots that were not removable. This is not the machine’s fault – it’s road tar.I found that if I pulled the machine backwards I had much better results. Also, mixing in ‘oxyclean’ with the water helps. And of course I had to make more than one pass with the machine, but that should be a given – you have to scrub the dirt out of the carpet.Give the carpet a good 24-hour period to dry with fans or A/C running. Not sure how the previous review was able to walk on the carpet within 3 hours, but that sounds as though the carpet wasnt saturated enough to be cleaned properly.This isn’t a magic machine. You have to make several passes on the carpet, but that should be a given.If you have only one or two carpets to clean once a year, this machine is likely more expensive than your needs. However, if you have a whole house/apartment of carpets, or you plan on cleaning the carpets more than once a year – this commercial grade machine is for you.Landlords, this machine is for you.