Bissell Stain Eraser Cordless Spot & Stain Review

An excellent little spot-cleaner, ideal for spills and stains inside your home and car.

What is the Bissell Stain Eraser Cordless Spot & Stain?

For instantly addressing party spills or tackling old stains on the car upholstery, the Bissell Stain Eraser is a rechargeable shampooer with cordless portability. It sprays, scrubs and vacuums up moisture like a full-size cleaner in a convenient hand-held form.

We just can’t fault the Stain Eraser for its effective cleaning, great chemicals and cordless versatility. It takes some getting used to the spray volume, and spot-cleaning might leave a clean patch, but for small spills and stains it’s a super-handy gadget.

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Bissell Stain Eraser Cordless Spot & Stain – Design and features

We’ve been working our way down Bissell’s carpet cleaning range. Here we have the brand’s most compact and portable shampooer yet: the Stain Eraser.  It’s small, light, rechargeable, and ready for action at the drop of a hat. Well, drop of a red wine glass most likely.

The cleaning concept is the same as Bissell’s larger cleaner, the Bissell StainPro 10. Spray the area with a mix of tap-hot water and cleaning solution, leave for a couple of minutes, and then agitate with the brush. You then simply vacuum up the moisture, complete with stain.

Dry, the Stain Eraser weighs just 1.7kg and is easy to manoeuvre thanks to its centrally positioned handle. It will happily stand upright or lay flat for storage. As a result of the rechargeable battery, this cleaner is one of the most convenient for use out of the home too. Car upholstery and patio furniture cushions are no longer a mains extension cable too far.

Build and feel are well up to Bissell’s high standards. The handle has a rubberised surface for extra grip, and the spray trigger is well placed beneath. The main on/off is a bubble button with a positive click.

The clean tank simply pulls from the front, while the waste tank unclips from below. Both the front plastic suction channel and the little agitating brush at the business end unclip for ease of cleaning.

Charging takes around four hours from completely flat. We got around 20 minutes of suction from that charge. That might not sound like much, but if you can’t shift a stain in that sort of time, it probably isn’t going to be shifted.

Bissell Spotclean Pro Cordless Spot & Stain – Accessories

Open the box, and you get the Stain Eraser, a wall charger with flying lead, manual and two bottles of shampoo. The primary fluid is Bissell’s Spot & Stain clean. It’s a clear, relatively sweetly smelling formula that won’t froth up too much. For tougher, dried-on stains you get the Bissell Oxy Boost add-in solution. This uses active oxygen bubbles to dig out stains that you might have thought were permanent features. We’ve been using Bissell’s Oxy chemicals in cleaners for years to great effect, so this is an excellent addition to the pack.

Bissell offers a range of other optional shampoos and add-ins too. These include a Pet Stain & Odour formula for unmentionable pet-based stains, and glass cleaning chemicals complete with optional squeegee accessory.

The Stain Eraser’s clean water tank is a compact 230ml. The first fill mark for warm tap water is at about 200ml, with the cleaning formula adding 30ml on top. The waste tank is a fair bit larger, although the fill line is halfway up at the 200ml mark. That’s more than enough for a stain or two.

From completely flat it takes around four hours for a full charge. Three blue LED segments illuminate on the handle to indicate charged capacity. We’d prefer a proper charging dock rather than the fly lead, though. While you can leave the fly-lead plugged in permanently, so the unit is ready to go all the time, it doesn’t encourage this in the manner a dock would.

The Sod’s law chance of it being flat as a pancake when that emergency spill happens is therefore high.

Bissell Stain Eraser Cordless Spot & Stain – Performance

The Stain Eraser will most likely be squirrelled away in a cupboard when a spill happens. It will also need filling with hot water and solution before being used. When the Asti hits the Axminster, we reckon it will be a good 5-to-10 minutes before you can hit the stain with the Bissell. So that’s how long we left our test red wine spill to soak in before proceeding.

Make sure you’re pointing the Stain Eraser downwards towards the stain. Oh, how obvious that sounds in hindsight. The spray is wide and pretty powerful: the Stain Eraser threw a jet 2m across the room onto a hi-fi system when we inadvertently pressed the trigger with the unit upright.

Sprayed directly onto the stained area, the output is prodigious too. All you’re likely to need is a few seconds to soak the area. The Stain Eraser will happily empty its entire clean tank in 30-to-40 seconds if you keep the trigger pressed. The spray foams up a little on the surface, giving you some idea of where it’s gone.

Depending on the fluid and the stain, the manual recommends up to five minutes’ soak time. That isn’t necessary on fresh spills such as our wine test, but with old stains – and using the Oxy Boost – it certainly helps.

Even before we started scrubbing, we could see the cleaning fluid doing its thing. A little scrubbing and then drawing the vacuum nozzle backwards across the area produced an impressive clean in one go. A second spray, scrub and vacuum, and the wine spill had vanished completely.

The Stain Eraser’s suction power clearly doesn’t have the grunt of a full-sized mains shampooer, but it’s enough. With the airflow concentrated into the small nozzle, you can see plenty of liquid and foam being drawn into the waste tank. The result was a damp carpet patch that dried off at room temperature pretty quickly.

The waste tank suggested we’d vacuumed up around half the total fluid used and the water had a distinctly red glow from the wine. Unclipping and emptying the tanks, giving the Stain Eraser a quick clean-out and reassembling is all super-slick. By the time it had dried off on the draining board and was back on the shelf charging, the carpet test patch was nearly dry. No trace of the red wine was evident. Perfect.

On fabric upholstery, you do need to exercise a little caution with the prodigious spray. Little and often is the way ahead. A second hand might be required to help keep fabric from sucking into the nozzle, although we didn’t find that an issue.

As we’ve discovered with other spot-cleaning machines, be cautious of where and what you’re cleaning. Addressing a spot stain in the middle of a grubby carpet may leave you with an immaculately clean patch that looks more obvious than the original stain. In which case you’are going to need a shampooer with a whole lot more coverage than the Stain Eraser.

On older stains, results are likely to be a little more variable. That blob of Dulux from 1988 or the engine oil from your Triumph Bonneville may be a challenge too far. But for day-to-day marks, dirt and stains, we’re yet to find anything the Stain Eraser and the Oxy Boost/Spot Clean solution won’t shift. Given its rechargeable portability, those marks can be on any carpet, rug, stairs, upholstery, out on the garden furniture or in the car too.

If you have ever frantically Googled “what to use on a spill of <insert highly staining food/drink/cosmetic as required>” then the Stain Eraser is for you. There’s no need to throw good white wine on red wine, vinegar on tomato juice, salt on coke, or moisturiser on lipstick. Just get out the Stain Eraser and the job will be done.

Why buy the Bissell Stain Eraser Cordless Spot & Stain?

With the caveat that a bright clean patch of carpet or upholstery might look even more obvious than a faint stain, Bissell’s Stain Eraser is an exceptionally handy and effective spot cleaner. Bissell’s excellent cleaning solutions, along with the Stain Eraser’s good suction power and outstanding portability make it ideal for emergency spills and old stains alike.

In a larger home we’d opt for a full-size shampooer with a detail tool, but for instant spill-cleaning and freshening up your car upholstery, the Stain Eraser takes some beating.

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