Steam Cleaner, Yowza!

This is a very handy product!



I went to Cindy's work a week or two ago, the day before she had a store inspection by her District Manager, and helped her out by scraping the gum off her wood floor.

How it's possible that many store patrons drop the chewing gum out of their mouths so that it ends up on the floor is beyond me. Hopefully it's very young children. But of course, the gum gets smooshed flat and dries hard as a rock and you're on your hands and knees trying to get it up with GooGone and a scraper.

After 2 hours, I gave up. I was only about 1/3 finished, and my thumb was really hurting from all the scraping. And I just kept thinking that there had to be a better way, a better tool.

I kept thinking about the steam cleaner I'd had my eye on for a month or two, for use around the house. I don't mind cleaning as long as I have good tools. And hot steam probably would easily rehydrate and melt dried floor gum...

And so I bought a steam cleaner, the model you see above. It's a 'Shark' brand steamer, they run about $100. There are a number of different attachments that come with it.

The bottle holds 800CC's of water and that will spray steam for up to 15 minutes, depending on what head you're using. It takes about 5 minutes to warm up the water. The unit is pretty well designed, but the trigger is a bit clunky and should be a lot more responsive than it is.

There's also an indicator light on the side of the steamer, which tells you if you're about to spray steam of optimum heat, or if you should wait a moment. Green=Go, Orange=Should wait. This light should be either on the spraying handle or on the top of the unit. As it is, if you're on the wrong side of the bottle, you have no idea if the next volley of steam is ready.

The gum results. The next time Cindy had a store-closing shift, I showed up with my new toy and tried it out on the gum. It took most gum deposits off in 60 seconds or less, and with zero scraping. Some more ancient gum took 2 minutes, still with no scraping.

It's really all about having the right tools.