Posted By Joe in Featured, In the Home, Review | 3 comments

A steam floor cleaner. I know. YAWN.
But wait. Because this here is a Moppy by Polti Review – and the Moppy is like no other steam mop I’ve ever come across, that’s for sure. But please be warned – the following images are NOT for the faint-hearted. Any domestic goddesses should turn away now, because what follows will not be pretty.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

So – the Moppy by Polti

Now I’m no clean freak. In fact, I try very hard to do as little housework as I possibly can. Sadly, with four children and a clumsy elephant dog, a certain amount is necessary. Particularly on the floors.

I have hardwood flooring and tiles throughout most of my ground floor, which makes sweeping a breeze. But of course a quick sweep doesn’t remove the actual remnants of the children who will keep eating (spilling). And drinking (spilling). And the dog who keeps going out (& trekking mud in).

I’ve used steam cleaners in the past, and I do love them – but they have their limitations. If the temperature’s not hot enough, they dribble. You’re tied to however long the flex is (which is never long enough). They tend to not be as manoeuvrable as my lovely vacuum… and they just clean floors.

Now ordinarily that’s fine – but sometimes I’d love it if they could whisk up and sort out the tiles in the shower, the kitchen cupboard doors, and the playroom table top.

So when Polti got in touch and asked if I’d like to give their new Moppy a try, I was happy to oblige – but really not excited. Just-another-steam-mop, y’see. Seen it before.

Only I hadn’t.

The Moppy’s different. And I’m rather in love.
On opening the box, I admit I was a bit confused; but a quick look at the image above and I grasped instantly what it does. The water never leaves the heating tray – the cleaning head itself simply sits above, steams the microfibre cloth, and then you swoosh away.

Which means a number of things. Firstly – no dribbles. Because the water never actually moves anywhere, you’re only cleaning with a Very Hot Cloth. So there’s no actual water.
Secondly, you’re not tied to a lead – you can swoosh this baby wherever you like, there’s no stopping you.
Thirdly, thanks to that lack of water, it works any way up you want it to.

Once I’d clicked together the separate parts of the Moppy I easily attached a cloth to the bottom (‘attached’ is a bit strong – laid it on the floor and stood the Moppy on it would be closer to the truth. The velcro force is strong in this one) I plugged the base unit in, filled it with water, turned it on… and waited. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. I placed the Moppy head onto the steam plate – and as if by magic hot steam started happening. It’s magic, I tell you.

Red base unit on the left, Moppy head in position over the steam plate on the right. The little red light shows it’s heating, and the little green light tells you the cloth is scorchio hot and ready to go.

It whisks around the floors with a swish and a glide, doing a magnificent job just as you’d expect from a super-hot steam cleaner. It’s also good to know that the Polti Moppy is 99.9% effective at removing 4 types of bacteria (E.Coli, E. faecalis, P. aeruginosa and Salmonella) when used with the cloths provided  – which are a super-thick and excellent quality microfibre type. But here’s where it gets interesting.

Two winters ago, we had a woodburner installed (stick with me here). It’s a thing of beauty, and we love it. But occasionally, for one reason or another (duff kindling, poor firelighting technique, wind in the wrong direction), it smokes horribly on lighting. This winter we had a large batch of kindling that for no good reason we could establish insisted on smoking horribly – to the point that we’d have to open the windows and french doors to let the initial billows of smoke out into the snappy cold air.

Come Spring, and sunshine hit the room – and you can imagine what it showed up across our walls and curtains. Ugh. A thick sludgy smoky coating on every single surface. The room has painted cream walls and a white ceiling (well, it was once) – and everything had become a uniformly smoky colour.
So – allow me to introduce you to my living room walls…

See the horrorshow (I did warn you)? To be fair, I have darkened it a little to show the effects of that beautiful little Moppy tool, but really – yes. My walls looked like that. And the curtains, and the ceiling too.

But the Moppy? Well, it just laughed in the face of that smoky nasty crud. That in the picture above is a quick double swish over the wall – an entire winter’s worth of woodburner smoke gone. In half an hour I had done two walls and the ceiling.
And best of all? Because there’s no technical parts on the Moppy head itself, it’s super thin and rotates 360 degrees.  Which means it can slip underneath the curtain track (and yes, that also needs scrubbing), and get right into the  very corners of the room.

With the pole extended it easily slipped behind the wall-mounted TV, and it flipped and rotated to work right up to the edges of the fireplace.

Frankly, it’s genius, and I’m never letting it out of my hot little hands (though to be fair I’ll probably choose not to steam a room during a heatwave in future…)

The Moppy by Polti is available through Ideal World, and is currently on offer at just £99.99 (usual price £130), which you can split into three easy payments if you wish.