The Hoover Floormate SteamScrub 2-In-1 is a versatile steam mop with a nice variety of attachments that let you clean not only hard floors, but stove tops, showers and faucets. This steamer easily switches between a scrub brush and the steam pad, which lets you loosen stubborn dirt before reattaching the pad to steam it clean. This is a nice feature that turns out to be necessary, since the pad alone doesn’t cut through dirt the way some of the better products in our steam mop reviews do.
This floor steam cleaner has settings for wood, tile and a simple steam mode to accommodate the type of floor you’re cleaning. It has an attachment specifically designed to help you clean food and grime off stove tops. This tool directly applies steam to the area you’re cleaning, and effectively helps you remove baked-on messes in one of the least pleasant areas of the kitchen to clean. Other attachments help with difficult areas like showers, faucets and hard-to-reach areas in your bathroom.
This steamer wasn’t the easiest to use in our tests. We liked the detachable scrubbing head, which is one of its most user-friendly features. Once it’s lifted off the cleaning pad, you’re in scrubbing mode. When you are done scrubbing, it clicks back into place to start steaming again. However, when you’re using the cleaning pad it doesn’t function smoothly. The handle swivels, but the cleaning head only goes back and forth, not side to side, unlike several other steamers in our lineup. Its tendency to stick due to lack of moisture doesn’t make for smooth maneuverability either. A button on the side that you press with your foot lets you apply extra steam at any time. However, the steam flow from the front spout is weak.
To activate water in the tank, you press a trigger on the handle. While the tank makes a lot of noise when you press the trigger, there isn’t a lot happening below. Not nearly enough water makes it to the pad. The flow of steam and water remained weak throughout testing regardless of how much water we had in the tank. For a steam mop that generates more steam, consider the H2O X5.
We had to make many more passes than average with this device to clean. This cleaner isn’t likely to leave a lot of excess water behind, but that’s because it doesn’t supply an adequate amount of water in the first place. Fortunately, the scrubber helps make up for some of this, but we’d like to see more liquid cleaning action.
The Hoover Floormate SteamScrub is a versatile steam cleaner with a variety of attachments that let you clean multiple surfaces. The head detaches to become a scrubbing tool that can loosen stubborn dirt before being steam cleaned away. While it boasts versatility, it didn’t produce enough steam for satisfactory results.
