Miss Ginger's Product Reviews!

A new feature for the new year! Miss Ginger, being the avid consumer, will offer you product reviews, shopping tips, and general advice designed to encourage your consumption and stimulate the economy! It's just Miss G's little way of "paying it forward"!
Her reviews will be honest, unrewarded, and completely and totally unbiased by anything except her own great taste and her real life evaluations!
Miss Ginger will review all kinds of products and services, and will note her recommendations thusly:

ONE LIPSTICK:

Leave it at the store! This product is not worth the tissue you'd blot on!

TWO LIPSTICKS:

This product has little merit for Miss Ginger, but some might find it interesting, useful, or worthwhile.

THREE LIPSTICKS:
It's a good product, and worth the space it takes up a Chez Ginger!

FOUR LIPSTICKS:

Highly endorsed by Miss Ginger. You probably need this product!

the coveted FIVE LIPSTICKS!:
What the hell are you doing reading blogs when you don't have this FABULOUS product in your house! Stop now and GO GET IT!!

Now that you all know the rules, let's play the game, okay?!

THE IMPETUS:

As you may know, Miss Ginger is a lover of all things kitteh. Especially Jackson and Shelby. Those of you who share Miss G's love for the feline species also know that they sometimes express their little feline needs and opinions "from the bladder". This is especially an issue with male cats, and older cats, both of which describe Jackson. And anyone who has been around cats knows that cat piss is one of the most vile odors on earth! Hence, the need for this product!

THE PRODUCT:

The Bissell "SpotBot®" Handsfree Compact Deep Cleaner promises you "the freedom to walk away while it does the work for you!" "While the SpotBot® gets the stain, you get back your day!" "All pets have accidents! That's why SpotBot® is trained to remove pet stains in no time!'

THE TRIAL:

Brother John left his plastic shoes on the floor, and those are Jack's favorite, so he peed on them! The cat urine got on an afghan unnoticed, and was transferred to the sofa accidentally.

Miss Ginger purchased the SpotBot at Lowes for about $119. She also purchased the special "Pet Stain and Odor" chemical for $17.84, which seems like highway robbery for a bottle of detergent.

This particular dose of cat urine had seeped down into the space between the cushions of the sofa, so Miss G immedately realized that the automatic feature of the machine was not going to work. Luckily, tha machine also comes with a manual "Tough Stain Brush" "for versatile cleaning of stairs, auto, and upholstery."


The brush attachment was easy to use on the upholstery, although there was a fair amount of "overspray" as the nozzle has a pretty wide spray pattern. Miss G will admit that this was a particularly difficult test, as the urine has saturated at the edge of the cushion near the welting, meaning it had soaked down into the seam. Now that the fabric, is dry, there is a faint smell of urine if one sticks one's nose down into the cushion, but it can't be detected from across the room as it could before cleaning.

Being the thorough reporter she is, Miss Ginger located this stain on the ottoman to test the unit's "automatic" feature for her gentle readers.

It's been there for a while and God only knows what it is, so Miss Ginger placed the unit on the stain and selected the "Set-in Stain" cycle on the unit.

The machine whirred into action, alternating periods of spraying, scrubbing, and sucking. Miss G noticed immediately that the machine released a lot of cleaning solution, which darkened the fabric and bled beyond the reach of the unit's rotating nozzles.


After about 5 minutes are so, the machine beeped to signal the end of it's cycle, and Miss G removed it to reveal this:

That big, wet, keyhole shaped spot would certainly dry with a dark edge on the napped fabric, and she suspected a big, clean circle would be left, based on the amount of crud in the collection tank.


So, Miss G employed the manual nozzle and hose to clean the entire surface of the ottoman, a process that took about 5 or 10 minutes and yielded embarrassing amounts of crud in the collection tank!


Once dry, however, the ottoman was clean, evenly colored, and spot free!


THE RECAP:
The Bissell SpotBot® is lightweight, small, and affordable. It operates effortlessly, as promised, but it will leave a perfectly round, obvious clean circle wherever it does it's work. If your carpets are even modestly soiled, it might be smarter to have the entire carpet cleaned. The collection tanks and hoses do have to be cleaned after each use to avoid having all that grossness fester in the machine, and Miss G had to mop the overspray off of the hardwood floors after using the manual attachment on upholstery. Still, the unit did leave the ottoman looking great, and greatly reduced the pet odor on the sofa.


THE JUDGEMENT:

THREE LIPSTICKS!

This is a product Miss G will pull out whenever Jackson pees on anything that's can't go in the washer.

What kind of products do YOU want Miss G to review?